newwalkmagazine

We are proud to publish two new pamphlets, which you can order here:

Steve Ely, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heauen

This sequence is about falling and fallen-ness, thrown-ness and being thrown. It is about love and betrayal, altruism and self-absorption.

‘These poems are blistering in their honesty [and] thread together a new perspective on fatherhood, masculinity, redemption and guilt’ (Kim Moore)

John Greening, Europa’s Flight

These fifteen sonnets, illustrated by the poet’s daughter Rosie Greening, began on a flight to Crete, as an exploration of the island’s mythology. He quickly found the myths were taking the poem where it hadn’t been scheduled to go – into oblique commentary on Brexit.

‘Greening fills his crown of sonnets with astounding combinations and varieties
of subject. He confronts borders and that which cannot be confined by
borders’ (Martyn Crucefix)

We are pleased to announce the publication of our two new pamphlets:

From the Notebooks of Korah’s Daughter by Linda Stern Zisquit
Fighters, Losers by Declan Ryan.

Get your copies here!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Linda Stern Zisquit has published five full-length poetry collections, most recently
Return from Elsewhere (co-winner of the Outriders Poetry Project, Buffalo, NY, 2014), and Havoc: New & Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, New York, 2013). Her
translations from Hebrew poetry include Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach (Sheep Meadow Press, 1997; expanded 2006), for which she won an NEA translation grant and was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Award, and These Mountains:
Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam (Toby Press, 2009). Born in Buffalo, New York, she has lived in Israel since 1978, where for many years she was Poetry Coordinator for the
Creative Writing programme at Bar Ilan University. She founded and runs Artspace, a gallery in Jerusalem representing local artists.

Inhabiting a landscape that is at once Biblical and contemporary, the speaker of Linda Stern Zisquit’s ecstatic sequence is the imagined daughter of Korah who rebelled against Moses and Aaron and who, together with his sons and followers, was swallowed up by the earth [Numbers 16: 1-33]. According to legend, Korah’s sons repented and became psalmists, singers on the highest rung of the underworld. No daughter of Korah appears in the traditional sources.

The series was begun in the summer of 2014 during a child’s cancer treatment and as war raged in Israel and Palestine. These ‘psalmwork’ poems are associative responses to the psalms, engaging the sacred and profane and weaving together strands of personal and national trauma.

‘Sin and holiness meet in the voice of Korah’s imaginary daughter, where transgression yields language at once turbulent and serene, delicate, musical, formally unbreakable. Zisquit is passionate and experimental; this is her boldest work.’
Alicia Ostriker

‘Keenly attuned to biblical lore and song, Linda Zisquit – alias Korah’s daughter – steals across sacral and profane worlds ‘with an eight-stringed heart’, courting danger, seeking wholeness.’
Gabriel Levin

‘Zisquit’s Psalms are passionate, hectic, sacrilegious. In a surrealist lyricism deeply coded by the Hebrew Bible, they blend erotic longing, sorrow for family illness, guilt, and grief for her country. A distinctive voice.’
Rosanna Warren

oOo

Declan Ryan was born in Mayo, Ireland and lives in London. His debut pamphlet was published in the Faber New Poets series in 2014. His reviews and essays on literature and boxing have appeared in the TLS, New Statesman, Boxing News, and elsewhere.

Diego Corrales, Arturo Gatti, Sonny Liston, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson: in a sense, as Jonathan Rendall put it, ‘Only the names change’. In this sequence of
telescoped narratives we meet boxers who are – or were – godlike, seemingly unstoppable, ready to shake up the world, then often shaken up by it in turn. Somewhere between there and here is an equally brutal form of glory, valour, and all too occasionally a resurrection.

‘A careful and tender collection of poems that tell stories full of heart and fate. Beautiful and moving, each boxer is heard and known again.’
Anna Whitwham

‘Moving through the ages, capturing one fighter after another, Declan Ryan’s beautifully stark poems strip bare the poignant truth of boxing. The names change, and each poem feels so fresh, but the same notes of loss and pain echo again and again. Fighters, Losers is as memorable as all the haunted boxers who stalk these pages.’
Donald McRae

‘When people talk about the poetry of boxing it’s not usually actual poetry they have in mind. Declan Ryan, though, locates the poetry in fighters’ lives, the moments of triumph or despair, the brutal rivalries and strange attachments, the rare glimpses of grace and redemption – and lifts them into brightly lit significance. Ryan moves deftly between registers and sources, with a faultless ear: for the rapidly shifting rhythms of his free-verse lines, for his subjects’ bruised, boastful celebrity, above all for the cadences of defeat, in the short or long term. His laconic, fascinating and often beautiful portraits of Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali or Rocky Marciano bring something new to poetry; whether you’re a fan of the fights or not, these great, sad, broken gladiators will never look the same.’
Alan Jenkins

Thursday, 23rd May
7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham 

Join us for the launch of the two new New Walk Editions pamphlets: Linda Stern Zisquit, From the Notebooks of Korah’s Daughter, and Declan Ryan, Fighters, Losers.

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. 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, Israel where she founded and runs Artspace Gallery.

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

It is an honour to publish these two tremendous pamphlets, and the event is not to be missed. This is Declan’s first publication since his Faber New Poets pamphlet in 2014, and Linda is making a rare visit to these shores from Israel.

The event is free, refreshments are provided, and pamphlets will be available for the first time on the night. Please let Five Leaves Bookshop know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Following a successful launch at Attenborough Arts, Leicester, on 9 November, we are delighted to announce the publication of our two new pamphlets. Click here to get them!

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) is considered by many to be the most important Russian poet of her generation. Her life, which coincided with some of the most turbulent years of Russian history, was one of extreme hardship. She was first and foremost a poet – everything else was secondary: ‘Through the indifference of grey moss / I proclaim – there will be poems!’ (‘Certainty’). In Bitter Berries, Moniza Alvi and Veronika Krasnova have translated a selection of poems from her later years, covering themes such as exile, conflict, and a poet’s fate, and conveying this poet’s range, depth, passion and power to astonish. The pamphlet is illustrated by the artist Katya Krasnova.

Moniza Alvi’s Homesick for the Earth, her versions of the French poet Jules Supervielle, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2011. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2002. Three of her poetry collections have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her most recent book is Blackbird, Bye, Bye (Bloodaxe, 2018). Veronika Krasnova graduated from Moscow University where she studied English and American literature. Her most recent translation was a selection of poetry by a contemporary Russian poet Stanislav Smelyansky, to appear in Holocaust Poetry: An Anthology edited by Jean Boase-Beier (Arc Publications). She teaches Russian language at UEA.

‘Bitter Berries is a stunning new rendition of Tsvetaeva’s lesser-known work, revealing a fierce and unexpectedly modernist sensibility in her later lyrics. Moniza Alvi and Veronika Krasnova’s translations are both flexible and lapidary, their imagist spirit enhanced by the inclusion of fragments of Russian text and Katya Krasnova’s elegant graphics. These bittersweet and moreish poems mark a significant contribution to Tsvetaeva’s oeuvre in English, and will be relished alike by new readers, established lovers and scholars of one of Russia’s most important and enduring poets.’
Tiffany Atkinson

oOo

Born of this world yet not quite of it, the ghosts that haunt the poems in Mike Barlow’s Some Kind of Ghost play with parallel realities, the alternatives – imagined, remembered, sensed and intruded upon – that shadow the everyday and taken-for-granted. Shifts and shivers, blind faith and fear, unspoken thoughts, hindsight, false trails, a missed beat in conversation, all lead to that ‘knife-edge feeling / as the will to fly competes with gravity’ (‘Ridge Walking with Maddy’). Condensed and surefooted, the poems have a deceptive ease and informality which bridge the inner and the outer worlds to take you somewhere unexpected.

Barlow’s first collection, Living on the Difference (Smith|Doorstop, 2004), won the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition and was shortlisted for the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize. This was followed by two further collections, Another Place (Salt, 2007) and Charmed Lives (Smith|Doorstop, 2012), and a number of pamphlets, one of which, Amicable Numbers (Templar, 2008) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. He is a former winner of The National Poetry Competition.

‘Poems of a wonderful fluency and scope imbued with a sense of the mystery that underlies all things.’
John Killick

‘Family voices, landscapes, back rooms: some of the routes by which Mike Barlow explores his own ghosts. These are poems in which “you hear your own heartbeat / amplified” (‘The Stump Cross System’), and share the rich texture of connections between the living and the dead.’
D. A. Prince

‘Yeats would have called them ‘Presences’, the ghosts Mike Barlow calls up or finds himself visited by in these lovely poems. Each has a substantiality which belies the merely wraith-like, as in the heart-breaking last stanza of ‘Posthumous’, where the widow of a dead soldier wakes “all hours now, / His warmth nudging her, wanting it. / She rolls over on top and the chill / Of his absence takes her breath away”.’
John Lucas

The two new New Walk Editions pamphlets are now available! See: https://newwalkmagazine.bigcartel.com/

Alan Jenkins, Tidemarks

Sea-scenes encountered in childhood, and the south London of a nautical-school adolescence, all remembered or revisited in middle age (or in dreams), provide the governing sights and sounds of these poems – a coast eroded by time, washed over by memory, sharpened by pangs of pleasure or regret. Voices of the past, and of sea-dogs real and imagined, form a reproachful counterpoint to the lyrical ‘I’, and as always in this poet’s work a distinctive music emerges from the collision of emotional
raggedness with metrical discipline, exacting eloquence with salty vernacular.

‘Jenkins stands out among his male peers with his uniquely compelling blend of intense feeling and elegant style’
Carol Ann Duffy

Polly Atkin, With Invisible Rain

With Invisible Rain explores location and dislocation in and of the body, through poems drawing on lived experience and found texts. Through the frame of the English Lake District, the poems examine living with invisible disabilities, and how pain might communicate, and be communicated.
The pamphlet is organised around extracts from two longer sequences. ‘v/s’ explores experience of Genetic Haemochromatosis, the treatment for which involves having pints of blood taken to counteract iron overload. In ‘Much with Body’, meanwhile, words from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals are repurposed to uncover the connection between the landscapes within and without: the external weather of the Lakes and the internal weather of the body.

‘At once deeply authentic and luminously metaphorical’
Sasha Dugdale

Mark Ford, John Gallas, Carrie Etter, Anna Saunders, Caroline Maldonado, Evan Jones, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Gina Wilson and others. An interview with Toby Martinez de las Rivas. John Lucas on C. K. Williams. And a great deal more! This is, for the time being, the last print copy of New Walk magazine, as we turn our attention to poetry pamphlets. Buy here.

ISSUE 13 – autumn/winter 2016/17 – BUY HERE!

ISSUE 13 CONTAINS:

New poems by Tom Pickard, Mary Noonan, John Greening, Zayneb Allak, Aly Stoneman, Stephen Knight, John Lucas, Alan Jenkins, Sue Dymoke and others. N.S. Thompson on B.H. Fairchild. Artwork by artists from the Leicester Print Workshop. And a lot more!