To read more about Waiting for the Sky to Fall please click here

Robert Dickinson's Micrographia:
‘Where does it hurt? In Battersea’ — so begins this exceptional collection in surreal tone. For those who have followed Dickinson’s work on the page, stage, and radio (Poetry Please), Micrographia has been worth the wait.

To read more about Micrographia please click here

New reviews on the site:
Acumen review of Norman Buller’s Fools & Mirrors by William Oxley, Issue 67, May 2010

Disability Arts Online review of Bernadette Cremin's performance Alter Egos by Colin Hambrook, 3rd May 2010

CHROMA review of Maria Jastrzębska’s Everyday Angels by Colin Herd , 27th March 2010

Eyewear review of Philip Ruthen's Jetty View Holding by Liz Almond, 24th April 2010

Readings:
Well done to Peter Street who was recently invited to do a reading in Norwich for Disability Pride 2010.

Simon Jenner is launching his latest pamphlet Pessoa, published by Perdika Press and edited by Mario Petrucci as part of the 'Poet in the City' event focusing on Fernando Pessoa, Tuesday 22nd June, 7pm at Bridewell Hall.

"A unique and splendid London-based celebration of the most famous Portuguese-language poet to emerge in the 20th Century. Also featuring Richard Zenith, the leading translator of Pessoa, and Ines Pedrosa, director of the Fernando Pessoa house in Lisbon. Poetry will be read in the original language and in English translation.Taking place at Bridewell Hall, as part of the Waxing Lyrical series forming part of the City of London Festival."

RSVP by calling 07908 367488, by emailing or by writing to
Poet In The City
c/o Cathy Galvin/Anmar Frangoul
News International
1 Pennington Street
London E98 1ST

To read more about the volume please click here

To read about Poet In The City events please click here

Sarah Hymas is reading from her debut volume Host

These poems are written as though several generations of the same family are still speaking, as the dead and living indeed do in all families. The poet’s land speaks as an ancestral character, but strangely. A feast of de-familiarisation and significant foregrounding, a nourishing image of lives and landscapes.
Herbert Lomas

Naomi Foyle is reading from her third Waterloo collection aptly named The World Cup

Naomi Foyle’s brilliantly detailed, sensually absorbed, light-saturated mix of personal findings and their extension into the political, make her poetry my sort of poetry. Naomi is her own subject, whether swimming in a scarlet two-piece at Land’s End, sitting in a restaurant window, arriving at Brenda and Isabelle’s object-littered flat, or acutely noting how ‘The sound your swollen finger makes/ plucking at the mouth/of the soda water bottle/ gives my cheekbones definition.’ Naomi Foyle injects concentrated visual imagery into re-casting a world in which ‘men are sharp as lemons; women sting like limes.’ I go to her poems to see things shine clear as the light in a diamond.
Jeremy Reed

Mouth music performed by Mouthtrap

Venue: The Maritime Museum, St George's Quay, Lancaster, LA1 1RB
Tel: (+44) 01524 382264
Time: 6.30 - 8.30pm
Free but booking necessary

For a map please click here

Waterloo Press would like to pay tribute to one of its stalwart poets and supporters, Michael Fenton, who passed away after a long illness on March 6th 2010.

Michael, 'Mike' to his friends and associates, was the last but by no means least of the poets published in a series of fourteen Waterloo Samplers. Enigma Codes (2005) was an aptly titled collection, echoing Mike's own verbal brand of ex-service elliptical patois, inherited no doubt from his time in the Navy, as was his habit on missed call messages of following his name with rapidly recited phone digits in the manner of a regimental identification number. His collection of 28 delicately sculpted, sparsely lyrical and imagistic poems not only beguile and intrigue, but also give glimpses into a truly colourful life; one of varied climates and careers, and stints in film and television production, including behind-the-scenes work on the iconic 50s/60s hospital drama Emergency Ward 10.

Michael will be remembered by all who knew him as a generous-spirited, warm and ebullient character, inimitable in his trademark beret, neck-scarf and horn-rimmed glasses; his velvet enunciation, reminiscent of old-style radio broadcasters, always refreshing to hear. He will be sorely missed.

'Ergo'

Strange to read
my own obituary
couched in glowing terms,
written by a stranger.

Perhaps he's afraid of death
and what might be said of him.

This leads me to write
my obituary.
To re-invent myself
without presumption:
a second coming?
A new curriculum vitae,
leaving my past on
an ever-rotating carousel;
enjoying this mutation
of self-portrayal:
a Dorian Gray in reverse.

At last I am released
— in celebration, in dance —
to chew cold turkey
in a psychedelic dream
writing the definitive
poem:

'Me'.

from Enigma Codes
by Michael Fenton
(March 5th 1927-March 6th 2010)

Helen J Beal's interview with Waterloo poet John O'Donoghue, author of Brunch Poems and his memoirs Sectioned, delves into how he became a writer and poet, how his memoirs came about and the role of poetry in today's society intermingled with anecdotes and observations of his life.

Poetry isn’t trying to get on the 6 O’Clock News. It owes no allegiance to anyone, least of all a political party. There’s no ‘going off message’ in poetry: poets have always been ‘off message’, which is why I think Plato wanted them banished from ‘The Republic’. Now having said all this, I do think poets have become rather wan, invisible creatures at the moment, content to cultivate their own small two inches of ivory rather than reach out beyond their own rather narrow world.

To read the interview please click here (fourth item from the top)

To see all the results please click here

New podcast from the London School of Economics on Literature and the Sciences: Where do they meet? Chaired by Waterloo poet and chief editor Simon Jenner.

Three poets discuss the interrelationship between art and literature and the social sciences. What are the links between these seemingly polarised disciplines? Does art have any concrete influence on the social and political sciences?

To listen to the podcast please click here

Waterloo poet Simon Jenner is Chairing a talk on Literature and the Sciences: Where do they meet? at the London School of Economics.
Date:          Saturday 13th February.
Speakers:   Michael Blackburn, Mario Petrucci, Richard Tyrone-Jones
Time:         12.30-2pm
Venue:       The Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building

Three poets discuss the interrelationship between art and literature and the social sciences. What are the links between these seemingly polarised disciplines? Does art have any concrete influence on the social and political sciences?

All events in the Literary Festival programme are free and open to all, but a ticket is required. 
To request a ticket using the online ticket request form please click here
To read more about the event please click here
For information and maps on how to get there please click here

Waterloo Press
cordially invites you to the
Brighton Launch of our European Programme

featuring

Maria Jastrzębska
reading from her new poetry collection
Everyday Angels

Emily Jeremiah
reading from
Bright, Dusky, Bright
her translations of the work of Eeva-Liisa Manner

and music from
the 'passionate and gutsy'
Sarah Clarke

7:30 for 8pm / Tues, Feb 16th / £5/4
Iambic Arts Theatre
above Bell Book & Candle on Gardner St
** Entrance is behind the shop, on Regent St
and will be signposted with balloons **
For a map click here
Cash bar

* * * * * * * *

Waterloo Press
is proud to announce
its European Programme,
publishing the best of European poetry,
both in translation and by poets writing in English.
In this list we seek to celebrate the great range of voices,
aesthetics and cultures that have always conversed in the European tradition.

Current titles include:
Sea of Leaves, by Irish poet John McKeown.
Future 2010 titles will include translations of
Osip Mandelstam by Richard McKane,
and Pierre Reverdy by John Goodby.

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 

A lustrous review for Alan Morrison's latest volume A Tapestry of Absent Sitters in The Journal ('of contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry')

This is definitive stuff - when Morrison tells what has to be told, one feels suddenly there is no other way of telling it, which is how we think of the great poets. Morrison may well be one of them.

To read the review, please click here 

Catch Jeremy Reed at the First Out Cafe-Bar on Sunday 26th April at 7.30
'The talented and unique Jeremy Reed will perform his amazing recital with a twist', 52 St Giles High Street, London, WC2H 8LH

For more information, please click here 

Stride review of David Pollard's book Patricides 
At all times, this work functions on the poet's handling of puns and double entendres, his demonstration of the slipperiness of language and the concentration of thought, as in 'between gasp'...

To read the review, Domestic Knowledge, Knowledge Domesticated © Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein 2009, please click here

Another glowing review for A Tapestry of Absent Sitters by Alan Morrison
In a universe full of ten-a-penny poets Alan Morrison is the genuine gold-struck and ready to be minted article. He is a poet setting off on his own unique journey; one that many will want to follow. ...It's a great feeling to be in at the start of what may ultimately prove to be a massive career.

To read the review, A Tapestry of Absent Sitters by Alan Morrison, on Poet in Residence by Gwilym Williams, 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