Wednesday 13th January 2010

Happy New Year!

You can now purchase Aldrington Day Hospital Poetry Group's Blank Versing the Past and Mill View Creative Writing Workshop Group's The Hats We Wear via PayPal. The community based project which produced this reversible anthology was funded by the NHS and any proceeds will contribute to further reprints and any future projects. 

To order a copy please click here
To read more about the anthologies click here

Saturday 12th December 2009

Waterloo Press is producing a new range of pamphlets in a range called Waterloo Slims. Our very first one is the PBS recommended Naomi Foyle with her Grace of the Gamblers: A Chantilly Chantey with stunning illustrations by Peter Griffiths.

Waterloo Press is equally proud to present Norman Buller's second Waterloo volume Fools & Mirrors. Buller who influenced Thom Gunn at an early stage of his career has produced a volume in which 'behind the prosodic elegance beats an earthy vitalism that tussles with a disembodied, spiritual distrust of the physical – a fascinating dynamic'.

Norman Buller
Fools & Mirrors

...an author with the remarkable distinction of being an influence on Thom Gunn in the first, youthful, phase of his writing. A more formal style comes to Buller with an easy elegance. Its mature melancholy creates a particular voice.
Will Daunt, Envoi

...what runs through most of Buller’s work... is a different direction entirely for the short poem, for Buller’s work is subversive at its core.
Jeremy Hilton, Poetry Salzburg Review

To read more about the volume click here 

Naomi Foyle
Grace of the Gamblers 
A Chantilly Chantey

‘Grace of the Gamblers’ is a bravura performance. Foyle captures the swash and buckle of Ireland’s greatest sea-faring heroine with a poetry that is charged with wit and vivacity. Herstory is brought vividly to life as Foyle charts Grace O’Malley’s remarkable journey from the dangerous seas off the West Coast of Ireland to the even more treacherous court of Queen Elizabeth I.
Nessa O’Mahony

To read more about the volume please click here

Monday 7th December 2009

Waterloo Press is proud to present its second high profile community publication following the success of the Brighton Unemployed Family Centre Project’s Salt & Vinegar.

Aldrington Day Hospital 
Poetry Group
Blank Versing the Past

Mill View Hospital 
Creative Writing Group
The Hats We Wear

The Hats We Wear/Blank Versing the Past is a two-book-in-one reversible production showcasing the creative writing of 70 mental health service users at Aldrington Day and Mill View Psychiatric Hospitals in Hove, selected, edited and introduced by Waterloo poet Alan Morrison. This extensive collection of poetry and prose, written mostly by inpatients on an acute ward through voluntary workshops provided by Alan Morrison over the last two years, has been funded by Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust through their Artists’ Award Scheme.

To read more about the Anthology please click here

Wednesday 2nd December 2009

Two fantastic new Waterloo volumes just published

Bernadette Cremin
Miming Silence

A deft way with metaphor and allusion that belies the heft of meaning beneath the illuminating imagery. Cremin touches on the terrors of being young, madness, bereavement squeezing into one poem the crispness and subtlety that others achieve in an entire collection.
Sara-Mae Tuscon, 
The London Magazine/Trespass 

In this engaging collection Cremin rekindles memories of teenage parties and erotic longing coupled with the harsh realities that follow. The language used is refreshingly direct and uncluttered. This is poetry that stares you in the eye. Brilliant
Les Robinson, Tall Lighthouse

To read more about the volume, please click here 

Maria Jastrzębska
Everyday Angels

Everyday Angels is a book filled with stories, such great vivid stories that span many worlds, that of Poland and Britain and those places where they overlap in the past and present. Jastrzębska’s poems have the beauty, warmth and rhythm of natural speech - a language that takes me directly into the poems. She has a ‘good ear’ and it serves her well. Moving, precise scenes and portraits bring a sense of true history. Tenderness and affection, grief and pain, duties and debts between generations, between us humans. Most of all, the poems show a deep respect for and fascination with people with all their faults and virtues and their marvels. I loved reading this unforgettable book.
Lee Harwood

To read more about the volume, please click here

Tuesday 21st July 2009

Waterloo Press is pleased to announce that Jeremy Reed's poem Blake from his latest collection West End Survival Kit will be part of the Forward Prize Anthology this year.

Blake

Part of the William genome
the Soho psycho’s
visionary phenotype

he bounced a Boeing off computer
over the Virgin megastore
nose cone doing mock terrorist

pointers to 9/11 towers
through a turbo corridor,
roof-topped it over Oxford Street

blowing out windows from the roar,
a kamikaze coke-head
shaving the city obelisks

in a kerosene cyclone
afterburn to Heathrow.
Was handcuffed on arrival

hallucinating terminals
as mortuaries, a jackal
ripping open body bags

for diamonds at the jugular…
Diagnosed delusional
Blake bought a decommissioned jet,

lived in it on Wandsworth flats,
grew gardenias in the cockpit,
manufactured LSD

and watched incoming airliners
morph into jewel-finned jellyfish,
his girlfriend atomize on touch

into 3D molecules
and knew he’d fly again, steal a Jumbo
and kill it over Whitehall.

© Jeremy Reed 2009

Tuesday 21st July 2009

Beryl Fenton
(1926-2009)
Author of Dandy Lady

We are all saddened by the loss of painter and poet Beryl Fenton (1926-2009) earlier this year. In remembrance of her Simon Jenner wrote an obituary in The Guardian. 

Please click here to read the full obituary 

Wednesday 25th june 2009

Jeremy Reed has a reading coming up with The Ginger Light at the ICA on July 30.

To find out details please click here

Waterloo Press is proud to present its latest volume, Bright, Dusky, Bright, a selection of translations of poems by Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921-1995), the Finnish poet, playwright, critic, novelist and translator. Manner was one of the most influential modernists in postwar Finland.

The translator is Emily Jeremiah, whose translations from German and Finnish have appeared in Books from Finland, Modern Poetry in Translation, and a recent Photographers' Gallery catalogue. For Jeremiah,

(Manner's) work seemed (...) to invite translation, because of its starkness, its simplicity even, and its extraordinarily powerful use of imagery.

To read more about the volume, please click here 

Jeremy Reed's reading this Sunday, 1st March, at 7.30 pm at the First Out Cafe bar in London. To find out details on his website please click here, for the First Out Cafe Bar's event schedule please click here. 

Norman Jope 'is the European flaneur par-excellence' brand new Stride review just published for his book, The Book of Bells and Candles

'...the writing is clear and functional in its expression of a narrative, yet suffused with lyrical imagery and beautiful moments. If there's a fairy tale element of enchantment within these pages - and there certainly is - then it's a charm where the warmth of a summer afternoon is periodically broken by the foreboding presence of dark forests.'

'The breadth of his ambition is impressive and filmic in its quality'
Steve Spence, Stride

To read the review European flaneur parexcellence, please click here 

'There's a depth and an energy to Morrison's writing' new Stride review for his book A Tapestry of Absent Sitters 

'This is a poetry which seems to be entirely devoid of the frenetic energies and increasingly empty ironies of much post-modern writing and there's a refreshing sense of engagement which is encouraging, especially in a young writer. There's a political anger, which comes to the fore in certain poems...' '...and an empathy for artistic outsiders and the down-and-out, which is reflected in 'his social observation' poems and his common alliance with earlier radical groups - the Diggers, Levellers, William Morris' circle etc. There's also variety of subject and a cultural richness within his writing which is impressive in its sweep.'
Steve Spence, Stride

To read the review Wanting to Make Common Cause please click here 

Glowing review for Jeremy Reed's new volume West End Survival Kit in Stride 

Reed is probably the most prolific and consistently excellent poet currently working in Britain. That his new volume has an introduction by J.G. Ballard and back-cover 'blurbs' from writers as diverse as David Lodge, the late David Gascoyne and Seamus Heaney would suggest the kind of 'cross-cultural' endorsement that most poets would die for.
Steve Spence, Stride

To read the review In Control please click here

Intense, intriguing and appreciative Morning Star review for Alan Morrison's latest volume, A Tapestry of Absent Sitters, 16th February 2009

Morrison writes in a rich, Miltonic voice, heavy with anger and prophecy. Britain is a "mossbacked Kingdom" owned and policed by the "blazered ranks" of the "straw-boatered," "privilege-peppered classes." 
Andy Croft, Morning Star

To read the review Imagery and Meaning, please click here 

Spotlight on Peter Street in Guardian Society article of 17th December 2008: 
"His life story is that of an itinerant autodidact, with shades of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Thomas Hardy's Jude... ...he's led a rollercoaster literary life - as war poet on a humanitarian convoy through Croatia in 1993, writer-in-residence for BBC Greater Manchester Radio, and co-architect of a 1998 Poetry Society project to take performance poetry into fish and chip shops in his beloved Wigan."

To read the article, Accidental poet on the right track, please click here

Bolton News article, 22nd December 2008
To read the article, Fifth book of poetry for ex-gravedigger, please click here

Reviews of the book
Peter Street: Thumbing from Pakrac to Lipik - new and selected poems by Matt Simpson, dao (Disability Arts Online)

Peter Street by Colin hambrook, dao

His fifth volume Thumbing from Lipik to Pakrac will be launched this spring. Launch details to follow.