FORTHCOMING MAY 2023
Alan Jenkins’ The Ghost Net will be the first full-length collection from New Walk Editions, and the first single-authored book of poems from Alan Jenkins in over a decade.
Pre-order here
£12, including postage and packaging, worldwide.
Dispatched by 8 May 2023.
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.
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
newwalkmagazine 