Bitterly, I was forced to be absent from the Cockpit Theatre swansong event for Smokestack Books last December due to a combination of ill health, stormy weather and unreliable trains, but I was certainly there in spirit, as will I always be with a vital and prolific imprint which over two decades published to my mind the most important socio-political poetry of our times. I also remain eternally grateful to Andy Croft for publishing what for me were three of my most important collections, Keir Hardie Street (2010), Tan Raptures (2017), and Anxious Corporals (2021). So I am a Smokestackite through and through.
There is now a vast chasm in the publication of contemporary working-class and socialist poetry, though outlets such as Culture Matters, Broken Sleep Books, and my own occasional small imprint Caparison, will no doubt rally into the future to try and keep some of that Smokestack-like flame alive. It is also reassuring to know that the Smokestack website will remain as an online catalogue and archive of the scores of excellent titles the imprint produced between 2004 and 2024. Smokestack casts a mighty shadow across the map of contemporary poetry and its legacy will undoubtedly sustain itself long into the future even in the absence of its actual operation. Founder and publisher Andy Croft is to be saluted for his great services to early twenty-first century British poetry.
Over the years I’ve reviewed Smokestack titles extensively in various outlets including the Morning Star, Socialist History Journal, here on Culture Matters, and my own webzine The Recusant. There are countless poets and collections the press has published that have not only greatly enthralled me from a poetry reader’s point of view, but also had considerable influence on my own poetry—a reciprocal poetic relationship that I suspect has encompassed many Smokestack poets over the years as each has developed almost dialogically in the spirit of mutual appreciation and poetic cooperation, poets influencing and helping to shape one another through each respective publication. Indeed, there are various seams and patterns of poet-types in terms of styles and themes that can be traced through the more than 200 titles produced over twenty years.
There are the contemporary polemical titles which include among others Francis Combes Common Cause, Chris Searle Lightning of Your Eyes; Paul Summers Union, Michael Rosen Don’t Mention the Children, Listening to a Pogrom on the Radio, Clare Saponia The Oranges of Revolution, Fiona Sinclair Slow Burner, Owen Gallagher Tea with the Taliban, David Cain Truth Street, Peter Donnelly Money is a Kind of Poetry, Mark Robinson How I Learned To Sing, Annie Wright Dangerous Pursuit of Yellow, Neetha Kunaratnam Just Because; the contemporary lyrical: John Berger Collected Poems, Ruth Valentine If You Want Thunder, On the Saltmarsh, Richard Skinner the light user scheme, The Malvern Aviator; Gordon Hodgeon Still Life; the socio-political historical: Jon Tait Barearse Boy, Michael Crowley The Battle of Heptonstall, First Fleet, Ian Parks Citizens, Bob Beagrie Civil Insolencies, Eftwyrd, Leásungspell, Steve Ely Incendiary Amoris, Oswald’s Book of Hours, Jim Greenhalf Cromwell’s Head, Keith Howden Jolly Roger, Bernard Saint Roma, Malcolm Povey Sedgemoor, Ben Thompson White Tulip, Rob Hindle Yoke and Arrows; the often eye-opening posthumous socio-political poetries: James Scully Angels in Flames, The Collected Poems of Montagu Slater, Vernon Scannell Farewell Performance Collected Later Poems, Peter Blackman Footprints, The Selected Poems of Clive Branson, Arnold Rattenbury Several Forms of Speech, We’re Going On! The Collected Poems of Tom Wintringham, Jack Lindsay Who Are The English?, Sylvia Pankhurst Writ on Cold Slate; social document/ working-class background works: Steve Blyth Both, John Seed Brandon Pithouse, Sean Burn Dante in the Launderette, Stephen Sawyer There Will Be No Miracles Here, Tom Kelly The Wrong Jarrow, Owen Gallagher Clydebuilt, Ross Wilson Line Drawing; international contemporary: Tasos Leivaditis Autumn Manuscripts, Laura Fusco Liminal, Nadir, Goran Simić New and Selected Sorrows, Andrei Sen-Senkov Moscow as an Upturned Umbrella, Kristin Dimitrova My Life in Squares; international historical/ posthumous: Ilya Ehrenburg Babi Yar and Other Poems, Olga Berggolts The Blockade Swallow, Louis Aragon Les Chambres, Henrich Heine Germany, Yiannis Ritsos Romiosini, Bertolt Brecht Mother Courage and her Children, Paul van Ostaijen Occupied City, Nicolas Calas Oedipus is Innocent, Anna Gréki The Streets of Algiers and Other Poems, Rocco Scotellaro Your Call Keeps Us Awake; the satirical/ conceptual/ narrative/ mythopoeic: Andrew Jordan Bonehead’s Utopia, Larry Beckett Paul Bunyan, John Gohorry Squeak, Budgie!, Andy Willoughby Between Stations, Martin Rowson The Limerickiard, The Love Songs of Late Capitalism; the justice system: Victoria Bean Caught, Liberties, Nick Moss Swear Down, Stephen Wade Stretch; contemporary employment: Martin Hayes Roar!, Machine Poems, When We Were Almost Like Men, Fred Voss Someday There Will Be Machine Shops Full of Roses, Graham Fulton Open Plan, Peter Raynard Precarious. This list is not complete and there are many other worthy titles besides. Those titles I present in bold are ones that left a particularly lasting impression and/or influence on me.
As aforementioned, the Smokestack website remains as an online catalogue/archive of this exceptional 200+ list—and what a treasury it is, a repository of some of the most important contemporary and historical socio-political poetry published in the UK which will prove invaluable to poetry lovers and poetry scholars alike well into the future and for posterity. Socially conscious poets and publishers alike, we must keep the Smokestack flame alive so that socialist poetry and underrepresented working-class and marginalised voices continue to be read and heard.
Alan Morrison
Here is a link to the Smokestack Books website where most titles can still be ordered (though a minority of titles are now sadly out of print): https://smokestack-books.co.uk/catalogue.php
