newwalkmagazine

with short readings also from Adrian Buckner and Tuesday Shannon

Wednesday 24 May, 7pm, Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham

Booking essential. Book here

A ghost net is a fishing net, or part of one, that remains in the sea after it has been discarded or lost. Alan Jenkins’s eighth full collection of original poems (and his first for a decade) has netted a haul of painful or poignant moments and memories: places and people recalled vividly, sometimes obsessively, in sorrow and in anger. Central to these are an unnamed woman – or women – and the journalist Marie Colvin, who was killed in Syria in 2012. But the paths and ‘sea-roads’ here beckon us insistently back into a past that is not merely personal: The Ghost Net is haunted by a sense of loss in which, as a reviewer of Jenkins’s New Walk chapbook Tidemarks pointed out, a nation and the way it sees itself are implicated. And the elegiac music so distinctive to this poet is accompanied by the wit, telling detail and powerful directness that make reading him a rare pleasure. 

New Walk Editions, edited by Rory Waterman and Nick Everett, has been publishing poetry pamphlets since 2017. Alan Jenkins’ The Ghost Net will be the publisher’s first full-length collection, and is Jenkins’ first book of poems in over a decade. 

Alan Jenkins was born in 1955, and has lived in London for most of his life. He has worked as an editor, reviewer and teacher in England, Europe and the United States, and published several volumes of poetry, among them the Forward Prize-winning Harm (1994), A Shorter Life (2005), Revenants (2013) and Marine (a collaboration with John Kinsella, 2015). New Walk Editions published his chapbook Tidemarks in 2018.

On Alan Jenkins:    

‘Only poetry can ask, answer, possibly even exorcise, the most difficult of life’s questions. All of poetry’s resources must be corralled to do this, and this poet is skilled enough to do it.’ Ellen Cranitch    

‘Jenkins combines extreme technical skill with outspoken expression and intense feeling, and makes each of these conditional on the other two. The outcome is an indivisible whole […] ingenious in execution, free-ranging, devoted to truth.’ Kenneth Cox

Adrian Buckner‘s most recent pamphlet, SeeSaw, was published by Leafe Press. Tuesday Shannon has published poems in PN Review, Wild Court, and elsewhere.

Book for event here.

Book can be pre-ordered here.

ORDER HERE. Choose the ‘single pamphlet’ option, and specify your choice at checkout – or why not take out a subscription?

Nothing is certain in these poems but no one is giving up – least of all the ghosts whose struggles in the next world run parallel with the struggles of those they left behind. If a separate appointment is required for the examination of a soul there is a strong possibility that this can be arranged.

Rebecca Farmer grew up in a large Irish family in Birmingham. She studied Drama at Manchester University and for many years worked as a secondary school teacher in London. Her husband died at the age of 42 and her focus for a long time became the care of their daughters. After she resumed her writing career her debut pamphlet Not Really won the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition in 2014, and in 2017 she completed a PhD at Goldsmiths. She has been a writer in residence at Gladstone’s Library and was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship.

William Thompson was born in Peterborough in 1991, and grew up in and around Helpston, the birthplace of John Clare, a man referred to during his lifetime as the ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’ and described by Jonathan Bate as ‘the greatest labouring-class poet England has ever produced’. Clare towered over the landscape of his youth: the prospect for Thompson, of writing about it in his shadow, was daunting. More recently, however, he has started to see a way of doing so, by telling the truth about what that landscape is like almost 200 years later.

William Thompson’s poems have appeared in Poetry Wales, Wild Court, The Honest Ulsterman, Lighthouse, The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-21, and other magazines and anthologies. He is studying for a PhD at the University of Bristol. This is his debut poetry pamphlet.

Join us online on 16 November, 7pm UK time, for the launch of our two new pamphlets. Register here.

REBECCA FARMER, A SEPARATE APPOINTMENT

Nothing is certain in these poems but no one is giving up – least of all the ghosts whose struggles in the next world run parallel with the struggles of those they left behind. If a separate appointment is required for the examination of a soul there is a strong possibility that this can be arranged.

WILLIAM THOMPSON, AFTER CLARE

William Thompson was born in Peterborough in 1991, and grew up in and around Helpston, the birthplace of John Clare, a man referred to during his lifetime as the ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’ and described by Jonathan Bate as ‘the greatest labouring-class poet England has ever produced’. Clare towered over the landscape of his youth: the prospect for Thompson, of writing about it in his shadow, was daunting. More recently, however, he has started to see a way of doing so, by telling the truth about what that landscape is like almost 200 years later.

ABOUT THE POETS:

Rebecca Farmer grew up in a large Irish family in Birmingham. She studied Drama at Manchester University and for many years worked as a secondary school teacher in London. Her husband died at the age of 42 and her focus for a long time became the care of their daughters. After she resumed her writing career her debut pamphlet Not Really won the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition in 2014, and in 2017 she completed a PhD at Goldsmiths. She has been a writer in residence at Gladstone’s Library and was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship.

William Thompson’s poems have appeared in Poetry Wales, Wild Court, The Honest Ulsterman, Lighthouse, The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-21, and other magazines and anthologies. He is studying for a PhD at the University of Bristol. This is his debut poetry pamphlet.

Pamphlets will be available to order from launch day onwards.

We are delighted to announce publication of our spring 2022 pamphlets:

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Ghalib: A Diary
Hugo Williams, The West Pier

Further information and a link to order is here.

Join us for the launch of two New Walk Editions pamphlets:

Ghalib, A Diary, by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
The West Pier, by Hugo Williams

Readings will be followed by an audience-led Q&A.

Register here.

Registration is £2, and can be redeemed on 10 May against the cost of any of our pamphlets. The new pamphlets will go on sale on 10 May.

ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA lives in Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayas. He is the author of seven books of poetry and two collections of essays, and has also done a lot of translation work. His Selected Poems and Translations was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for poetry, and his Collected Poems (not including Ghalib, A Diary) was published by Shearsman this year.

Ghalib has been called ‘one of the most subtle and complex minds of the Indian nineteenth century’. In Dastanbūy (Nosegay), written in 1857 and 1858, he reflects on the events of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. Ghalib, A Diary draws on an English translation of the original Persian and also, formally, on Basil Bunting’s Chomei at Toyama. The result is a narrative immediate in its telling, and at once particular and universal in its predicaments.

HUGO WILLIAMS was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex. He worked on the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, and since then has earned his living as a journalist and travel writer. Billy’s Rain won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1999. His Collected Poems was published in 2002. In 2004 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

The West Pier is a lyrical sketchbook of the poet’s life so far. A teenage brush with Swinging London in the company of Guinness heir Tara Browne, who “blew his mind out in a car” in the Beatles’ ‘Day in the Life’ is the traumatic transition to adult life and marriage in pre-gentrified Islington, one time haunt of his hero Sir Walter Raleigh. The sequence is shaped and shadowed by the ‘leaving faces’ of friends and the heinous arson of Brighton’s West Pier, where he played as a child and went on early dates.

Please join us for the online launch of new pamphlets by John Gallas and Belinda Rimmer! You can SIGN UP HERE, and advance registration is required. We hope to see you there! To order the pamphlets, please follow THIS LINK. Thank you!

We are delighted to announce the publication of these two very different pamphlets. Orders can be made HERE. Please also note that we will be launching the pamphlets at 7pm UK time, online, on Thursday 18 November. You can sign up HERE. Further information about the pamphlets is below.

Belinda Rimmer, Holding On

Order HERE.

These poems all concern themselves, in one way or another, with female experience. Precise evocations of significant moments from the poet’s life in various settings – kitchen, classroom, nightclub, riverbank, hospital ward – are complemented and enhanced by fulsome tributes to the lives and achievements of creative women who have inspired her. The pamphlet not only bears eloquent witness to the challenges of living as a woman, and as a girl, in an often hostile world; it also explores the processes of memory and imagination by which such challenges are endured and understood.

“Take the reader inside the lives of the damaged but defiant: her female protagonists bear the scars of their struggles and insist on their right to self-determination. Whether dancing partnerless in a 1970s disco in Swindon, straining against the restrictions of bourgeois marriage, or coping with mental illness, these girls and women are often ‘alone but not lonely’, finding inner freedom in a world that otherwise hems them in.”
David Clarke

John Gallas, Aotearoa/Angleland: 40+40 Tankas

Order HERE.

A life, a heart, a soul – and a book – divided. Happily divided. In this pamphlet, John Gallas wanders the corners of his two homelands: Aotearoa and England. The heart doesn’t bleed, the soul doesn’t yearn to be one, and Life can always get on a plane.

“Only the form is consistent: other things vary – the language, for example (snatches of Latin and Spanish, and five whole lines in Esperanto), the settings, the mood (brisk, tender, romantic, demotic, inconsequential), the personnel (Bev in Aotearoa is enjoined to round the sheep up, and why is that owl standing on a station platform in Angleland with a paper bag on its head?) His restless imagination and exuberant vocabulary bounce us through a variety of locations, moods, landscapes and seasons, from the bush-clad South Island of New Zealand to some distinctly unpredictable spots in the English Midlands.”
Fleur Adcock

These pamphlets will be launched online on 4 May, 7pm UK time. Sign up here!

• Lisa Kelly, From the IKEA Back Catalogue

These poems are preoccupied with how IKEA, as a global corporation, uses language and marketing terms to create iconic products that will find their way into our homes and are part of a disposable culture opposed to a more sustainable way of living. When the language is freed from its corporate mould and the explicit aim to sell, other worlds and stories suggest themselves. The poems attempt to resist the orbit of the corporation and its intent to subsume language into currency and profit.

“Wandering the claustrophobic and endless aisles of IKEA, Lisa’s imagination delves into language and draws on inspiration from the likes of William Carlos Williams and Anton Chekov.” Briony Bax

ORDER HERE!

• William Wootten, Looking at the Horsemen

The poems in this pamphlet range across settings, subjects and eras: from Christ at the workbench, to rats on a plague ship, to life on a far planet. They may darkly reimagine fictional ideals – whether of shepherds or superheroes – or give elaborate shape to uncomfortable truths. Still, the poems’ most persistent preoccupation is time. They can look forward from the past, or back from the future, or simply catch the moment the season turns.

“There is nothing, one feels, this poet could not have language do.”
Jonathan Edwards

ORDER HERE!

Please join us at 7pm (UK time) on 15 September for a New Walk Editions reading with three of our wonderful pamphlet poets. 

Registration is required, and space is limited. Please register here. Registration is only £2.

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Alan Jenkins‘s collections of poetry include Harm, The Drift and A Shorter Life (all with Chatto & Windus) and Revenants, published by Clutag Press. His New Walk Editions pamphlet, Tidemarks, was published in 2018. He has served as long-time Deputy Editor and Poetry Editor of the TLS, and was Writer in Residence at St John’s College, University of Cambridge from 2015-18. His many poetry awards include a Forward Prize, a Cholmondeley Award, a shortlisting for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and a Poetry book Society Choice.

Linda Stern Zisquit has published five collections, most recently Return from Elsewhere and Havoc: New & Selected Poems. Her translations from Hebrew include Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach and These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam. Her New Walk Editions pamphlet, From the Notebooks of Korah’s Daughter, was published in 2019. For many years she has been Poetry Coordinator and Associate Professor in the Bar Ilan MA in Creative Writing Program. Born in Buffalo, NY, she lives in Jerusalem.

Declan Ryan was born in County Mayo, Ireland, and has lived mainly in London. He was published in the Faber New Poets series in 2014, and his New Walk Editions pamphlet, Fighters, Losers, was published in 2019. His work has appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry (US), Poetry Ireland and the New Statesman, among others.

There will be a Q&A session after the reading, during which you’ll be welcome to ask questions.

Thank you for your support. We hope you enjoy the reading. Please register here. The event is scheduled to lat one hour.

You can order any of our pamphlets here.

We are delighted to announce the publication of Kate Bingham’s Archway Sonnets and N. S. Thompson’s After War. They are available to order now, in advance of their online launch on 13 August. Please visit our shop to make an order. Subscribers’ copies will be sent out very soon!

Register for the launch reading here.

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After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the reading. At the event, you will be able to ask questions, and there will be a Q&A following the readings. Run time is expected to be one hour.

About the poets and pamphlets:

N. S. Thompson is a poet, critic and translator of Italian fiction. He has worked as a gardener and museum curator in Italy and an academic and creative writing tutor in Oxford. With Andy Croft he edited A Modern Don Juan: Cantos for These Times by Divers Hands (Five Leaves) and his poetry publications include Letter to Auden (Smokestack Books) and Mr Larkin on Photography (Red Squirrel). His translations of Italian poetry can be found in The Faber Book of 20th Century Italian Poems, Eugenio Montale: Poems (Penguin) and Centres of Cataclysm: Fifty Years of Modern Poetry in Translation (Bloodaxe).