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MOLLICLE
Claire Crowther
Mollicle by Claire Crowther is zesty, mysterious and mischievous. Curiosity and surprise comes from a chorus of diverging and merging voices; mothers, daughters, ‘Alices’ and others, the ordinary world turned kaleidoscopic and rearranged in Crowther’s distinct and elegant fashion. These poems are not without their glinting sharp edges either, which emerge without warning and ask of us whether we wish to leap or look down first.
“Claire Crowther’s work is wittily compelling, a complex music. Poems by Crowther are events. With equal power, Mollicle reflects the outer world and the mind’s life, intensely illuminated.
day and night, repay your loan:
shine with sun’s compulsive light. ”
- Alison Brackenbury
Price: £5.00
Launched: Sunday 3rd October at Warwick Words festival.
FUNGLISH
Ruth Larbey
Ruth Larbey's debut collection, Funglish, is a maiden voyage alive with the simple thrill of exploration. Arriving in the big city for the first time, and encountering love armed only with the crackle of language, she re-imagines liminal spaces into new territories vibrant with possibility. With Funglish, Ruth Larbey has begun to write the first chapter in the history of the new romantics.
“There’s a drastic incandescence to Ruth Larbey’s syntax which pulls you into her poetry. Writing with an edgy control reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, her poems create exacting ‘electric constellations’ of vision and nerve in which no word is wasted, no darkness left unexplored. As Dickinson wrote, ‘A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.’ Ruth Larbey’s language is alive and gravid.”
- David Morley
Price: £5.00
Launched: Sunday 3rd October at Warwick Words festival.
SHOD
Mark Goodwin
When Sidney Realer experiences a moment of revelation in the supermarket aisles, it sets him off on a pilgrimage through a frighteningly familiar contemporary landscape. With narrative roots in the biblical, mythological and folk traditions, Shod is a twenty-first century parable, spirited and dark in equal measure, taking place in the clone-town wilderness, fearlessly singing the songs of our all our wrongs.
Praise for Shod:
"Raw, distinctly voiced, and edgy, Shod is a Twenty-First-Century allegory that doesn’t disappoint. Sidney Realer, the Shoe Messiah, and the apocalyptic cast of characters he encounters, stays with the imagination long after the poem has been read. With echoes of popular song, religious tracts, and consumer culture, Shod has overtones of the dissenting art of William Blake. But this is Blakean work which is very much for today, as Sidney moves between the blank-walled supermarket and broken-rural hinterland of a town’s outskirts. This is disturbing, savage, and memorable poetry, with something uncompromisingly human at its heart." - Deborah Tyler-Bennett
"Rich in folk tale, oral history, classical myth and religion including Nike as all too convincing goddess, AZDA as an underworld of sorts. Like Berryman's Henry, Goodwin has created a combined muse, foil and antihero in Sidney, at once everyman and every troubling crazy dream. He writes with an elegant, engaging strangeness, always anchored fast in our world through something that unites us all and keeps us all walking unhobbled. Shod's shoes are firmly on the ground, but its mind is tearing through the micro- and macro-verse with allusive abandon. It's an inspiring, extraordinary ride." - Luke Kennard
"Mark Goodwin's Shod takes us for a walk on the wild side of poetic adventure and it's a treat." - Geraldine Monk
Launched: 9th August 2010
Price: £9.00
ISBN:
THE SOPRANOS SONNETS & OTHER POEMS
Roz Goddard
Roz Goddard’s The Sopranos Sonnets & Other Poems is acutely observed, streetwise and bittersweet. At its heart are ten sonnet-portraits inspired by the television series about a dysfunctional mafia boss and his family. Among the cast of characters is Gloria, the hauntingly-seductive mistress with a built-in self-destruct button, and Leotardo, ready to murder at the drop of a letter…
These poems bristle with unexpected twists; they delve into the dark cauldron of human experience; by turns they are serious and comic, compassionate and pin-sharp. Roz Goddard's collection will entertain and provoke; it moves seamlessly through different perspectives, always putting the reader at the heart of the action.
There will be a strictly limited-edition run of 100 signed copies, with gold litho-printed covers (priced at £7.00), as well as a standard edition. We advise subscribing in advance to ensure you can get your hands on the limited-edition pamphlets.
Launch date: 11th July 2010
Price: £5/£7
ISBN:
Download an order form HERE
IMPROVISING MEMORY
 View an extract of this book HERE
Milorad Krystanovich
“You don’t need to imagine me – a man with his photo camera hanging from its strap on his shoulder. For you, I would describe myself as a photographer whose hobby was not a simple black and white technique of evidencing the elements of everyday life… Later on, instead of developing films in a dark-room, I used my notebook and pen and exposed my hands to the lamplight.” - Milorad Krystanovich
In Improvising Memory, Milorad Krystanovich releases the characters trapped in the tableaux of negatives, and breathes into them a remarkable life of their own. Portraits step down from their frames and exist amongst us; before our eyes they age and alter, ponder their own flaws, confines and mysteries.
Krystanovich’s beautifully-detailed series of poems explore the spaces between images and populate them with a patient and delicately-balanced language that moves in circles and echoes, creating a lyrical resonance in the act of both observing and being observed. Freeze-frame fragments become striking and graceful poem-scenes, alive with moments tangible and fleeting, just out of reach or coming into focus at the edge of sight.
Launched 27th May 2010
Price: £8.00
DIFFICULT SECOND ALBUM
View an extract of this book HERE
Simon Turner
Simon Turner’s Difficult Second Album not only fulfils all the threats and promises of his debut, You Are Here (Heaventree, 2007), but also rightfully sees him take his place as a true troubadour of the surreal.
Featuring his most accomplished work to date, this second collection is not in fact difficult, but rather darkly precise, quick-witted and modestly bold. Turner has an eye for infectious and joyously offbeat lines, rendering both the incongruous and beautiful in his own version and voice.
Wherever Difficult Second Album may veer, between deftly lyrical but defiantly modernist poems on nature, acidic and satirical cut-ups on world politics, or in the quiet riots of notes to self, rejection slips and mislaid manifestos, Simon Turner remains confident and foot-sure in the strangeness and abundance of it all, of what poetry both intends and is capable of.
Praise for Simon Turner’s previous work:
“…descriptively tricksy and tenderly felt and clever all at the same time. An impressively neat manoeuvre by any standards.” - C.J. Allen, Litter.
“…a very accomplished and entertaining volume. Phrases are eloquently turned, and sometimes revisited to be turned inside out and upside down” - Sarah Law, Stride
“Turner seeks to arrest and repay the reader’s attention, his jagged language alternating with stretches of quieter meditation. He’s not afraid of form, either: the lyrical and the concrete both take their turn throughout” - Michael W. Thomas, Raw Edge
Launched 24th April 2010
Price: £8.00
FROM THE BOAT
 View an extract of this pamphlet HERE
Myra Connell
“Are you waiting for the dawn?” Dawn may help. But I am waiting for the water. For the pool to fill and
slowly
for the boat – the walnut-shell, the matchstick mast and paper sail – to rise, float on.”
These poems From the Boat come from a time of waiting, of mourning, and of finding small consolations. They are, many of them, small poems, the opposite of heroic. Bare, spare in mood, and exploring a sense of dislocation and disorientation, they look coldly at what is left when almost everything is pared away.
And yet they rejoice in moments of revelation – the golden flash of carp in a pool, a red jacket on a woman in a cafe; and the words, the language, the poems themselves, never feel doubtful or uncertain in their own power.
Myra Connell’s poetry is measured yet generous; experimental and adventurous; sharp, often angry, and yet tender.
FROM THE BOAT is a Nine Arches Press pamphlet
Launched: February 2010
Price: £5
THE NIGHT OF THE DAY
 View an extract of this pamphlet HERE
David Morley
The Night of the Day is remarkable for the skill and grace with which it travels through the difficult territories that map a journey from darkness towards light. In this movement from out of the shadows, it engages with tricks of the light, vanishings, illusions, magic and bitter realities, whilst using the terrain of language that each necessitates.
From the brutally austere language that depicts a child’s experience of violence that opens this short collection, the poems move thematically into the natural world and the darting, shifting vocabularies of memory, friendship and loss. The Night of the Day keeps a solid and determined pace, which ultimately brings us under the canvas of the big top and into the lives of the travelling circus people, in their own words, their own voices, an undertow of threat and prejudice forever shadowing their footsteps on the road.
Available as a standard edition (£5) and also a limited number of fifty, with special silver litho-print covers, which will be signed and numbered by David Morley. NOW SOLD OUT - SORRY!
Launched November 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9560559-7-2
The Night of the Day is a special-edition Nine Arches Press pamphlet.
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH
 View an extract of this book HERE
Peter Carpenter
'One year's the history
Of Europe, time runs barefoot on the cinder-track
At the White City'
- from 'Namings'
Peter Carpenter’s poetry is radiant with quiet surprises, important moments captured in the folds of an old document wallet, in back gardens or on winter sea-fronts, buried in the sand or hidden by the noise of a football crowd. Such moments take flight to uncover a distinctive take on both ‘the here and now’ and the echoes of public and private histories. After the Goldrush is thus of its time and about time, in the attentive, skilful hands of a poet truly hitting his stride.
Praise for Peter Carpenter:
'…a new voice, precise and distinct, and therefore, doubly welcome' George Szirtes
'In short, Peter Carpenter is a masterly portrait-painter' - Matthew Jarvis English
'always original and enjoyable poems…there’s something modestly dazzling about Peter Carpenter’s writing, but also something wonderfully spare and taut… it reminds me in places of the modern pastorals of R.F. Langley… the tone jinks and darts from the tender to the sardonic, the wry to the comic' - CJ Allen, Staple.
'Peter Carpenter has the ability to pull the rug from under your feet at the very moment when you think you’ve got his number.' - Jeremy Page, The Frogmore Papers
Launched 4th October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9560559-4-1
After the Gold Rush is a Nine Arches Book
SOUNDS IN THE GRASS
 View an extract of this book HERE
Matt Nunn
‘...the scratching riff of despair fancying hope,
the 2-Tone glow through this, our longest epilogue,
the sound of rebuilding whilst structures are still collapsing,
a shot of short-term optimism stretched to ring forever.’
- from 'Coventry Calling'
Join Matt Nunn as he travels through the spaces that define us, taking in subjects as diverse as Mother Nature, the back catalogues of youth, breaking down at the greasy spoon and hitting the highways, all accompanied by generous and bittersweet helpings of food, sex and music.
Matt Nunn’s third collection, following on from Apocalyptic Bubblegum and Happy cos I’m Blue is his most complete yet.
Praise for Matt Nunn:
‘Nunn has the staccato, twisted, lyrical joy in language of an English Raymond Queneau and he brings it to bear on a beautiful, litter-strewn urban landscape where “civilisations intersect” in travestied platitudes, deep-dish riddles and a cavalcade of local detail all at about 100mph. If you’ve heard Nunn read out loud you’ll be familiar with this energy and the hallucinatory clarity of his imagery. He ploughs fearlessly straight into class, religion and education with frenzied, articulate wit matched by rage, which is not to overlook the genuine warmth and humanity beating underneath the surface. Sounds in the Grass realises the potential suggested by Nunn’s previous collections and then some.’
– Luke Kennard
'One moment he is like Hopkins on speed, the next like a latter-day Prufrock spilling the beans'
- Peter Carpenter
'Matt Nunn is multitudes'
- David Morley
Launched October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9560559-5-8
Sounds in the Grass is a Nine Arches Book.
THE TITANIC CAFE CLOSES ITS DOORS AND HITS THE ROCKS
or
Knife, fork and bulldozer ultra modern retail outlet complex development scenario with flowers.
image © David Hart 2008
David Hart
Where the full main title of David Hart’s forthcoming special-edition pamphlet fantasises, the second title suggests the wider scene...
Originally probably an office and observation point for the canal company, on the Bristol Road in Selly Oak, Birmingham, the freestanding building that takes centre stage in this sequence was in recent memory the Knife and Fork café (Titanic café, unsinkable), a small business next door, and above them a huge advertising hoarding. After storm damage, the place became derelict and in 2007 was demolished.
The poem and notes are a mix of local history, surreal and playful language, and not a little anger at the proposed ‘development’ of the canalside area as a huge retail complex on what is poisoned ground sprouting something of a revelation – a wonderful crop of wild flowers.
Published by Nine Arches Press as part of their new mini-pamphlet series, The Titanic Café closes its doors and hits the rocks will also include a selection of colour photographs taken by David Hart on location to accompany the poem. This vivid and dynamic sequence is a fitting swansong to a city’s lost landmarks, the vanishing and shape-shifting human geographies of the heartlands.
Birmingham-based and the city’s Poet Laureate 1997-8, David Hart is known for other Birmingham poems, for hospital and other residencies, for university teaching and workshops, and by way of several books, the latest (Five Seasons Press 2007) being ‘Running Out, which Lyndon Jenkins in Poetry Wales said “is a joy”.
ISBN: 978-0-9560559-3-4
Price £8
Praise for The Titanic Cafe:
"Titanic Cafe is one of the most lightly achieved, unpretentious, mordantly ironic, and relevant contemporary poems I have ever read. It possesses gravitas in spadefuls, yet never fails to laugh at its own futility as a gesture against change - this is the poet as King Canute, both pointing ironically and weeping as the waves sweep in around him, or the bulldozers in this case."
- Jane Holland. (Read the full review here.)
THE TERRORS
image © Emma Robertson 2009 View an extract of this pamphlet HERE
Tom Chivers
The first in a series of special edition pamphlets from Nine Arches Press; darkly-humoured e-dispatches of crime and punishment from over the walls and across centuries....
The Terrors is a sequence of imagined emails; poetic missives from the start of the 21st century to inmates at London's notorious Newgate Prison. The emails introduce a cast of 18th century villains and their gruesome crimes: 'Half-hanged Smith'; executioner-turned-murderer Jack Ketch;
the notorious Waltham Blacks.
Mimicking the tone of its primary source, The Newgate Calendar, The Terrors tacks from horror to humour, from moral disgust to the casual chit-chat of the digital generation, all the time delineating London's violent urban undercurrent in bold, energetic and sometimes shocking language.
March 2009
Price: £5
ISBN: 978-0-9560559-2-7
Praise for The Terrors:
'Dark London history, dredged and interrogated, spits and fizzes with corrosive wit. Language-receipts sustain the necessary illusion. IT MATTERS. It matters: the weight and pace of delivery, the balance of breath. Tom Chivers understands the risks he risks, the play in a taught rope. 'I'll ghost-write, if you ask.'
Iain Sinclair
'It's difficult to give an impression of the excitement this collection generates for me. It's a truly remarkable sequence, alive to the possibilities of what language can do, totally confident in its creation of a hyperreality where past and present mingle and bleed into one another. If all of its meaning is not immediately apparent at first, second, or even third reading, this is no kind of handicap. The verve and energy of the writing is enough to make the leap over any semantic gaps the reader might uncover. This is a very achieved debut, and I see it as something of a call to arms to other young poets: who's going to top it?'
Simon Turner, Gists and Piths
'Another of the things I enjoyed most was the tension between the compressed, shorthand form of the typical email, and the poet’s instinct to wax lyrical. It results in a sense of language only just being kept under control (and at times it glimpses freedom and explodes into all sorts of unexpected allusions and associations). That tension, of course, mirrors the knife edge on which the gaol’s inmates are treading.'
Matt Merritt, PolyOlbion
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