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