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.
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).
Several of the poems in After War are direct autobiographical reminiscences of childhood landscapes studded with reminders of war and depictions of postwar reconstruction. Others present snapshots of America and Italy directly after the Second World War. All speak, one way or another, to the world in which we find ourselves now.
‘Elegant and thoughtful. The poems are distilled and forceful.’ Rachel Hadas
Kate Bingham is the author of two novels, several screenplays and three collections of poetry. Quicksand Beach was short-listed for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2006, and in 2010 ‘On Highgate Hill’ was short-listed for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her third collection is Infragreen (Seren, 2015). Archway Sonnets is her first pamphlet.
Set in one of London’s least celebrated districts, and guided by John Clare’s sustained close-up attention to place, these urban and domestic nature poems are miniatures from the early days of a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene, a time of reckoning and constraint. They live within their means, as we all must, seeking to reduce, reuse and recycle the world as they find it. Each sonnet is an experiment in adaptation, an attunement to form.
‘These sonnets – which have shuttled me between grief and joy – make one grateful to be alive.’ Kathryn Maris
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