Our launches this year feature an exciting Spring poetry season followed by the launch of two outstanding novels in the Autumn.
There’s a small charge of £2.50 for registration to help us with the costs of the Zoom platform and to keep the events secure and a discount code at the launch so you can buy the books for 20% discount.
We begin in March with the launch of our two prize-winning pamphlets from the 2021 Pamphlet Award.
Please join Sue Lewis & Bonnie Thurston for what will be a wonderful launch on Thursday March 3 @ 7.30 p.m. (UK time) to celebrate Journey and Forgotten Futures.
Register for the two prize-winning pamphlets launch here
Winners of the Cinnamon Pamphlet Award 2021, these pamphlets will delight and move you. Sue Lewis’s Journey has the ability to combine a conversational tone with exquisite phrases and images that surprise without any need for showiness. Bonnie Thurston’s Forgotten Futures: a memoir is a tender heart’s cry and a passionate celebration in one. There is deep poignancy and longing here, but not a mawkish or maudlin word.
Three poets, two pamphlets and a collection
We’d love you to join G.W. Colkitto, Ian Marriott, and David Underdown for an evening of outstanding poetry, launching Clyde: my river, Touched and Jigsaw on Wednesday March 30 @ 7.30 p.m. (UK time)
Register for the launch here
Wordplay and understated humour enliven many of the poems, and the final section is a tender tribute to ‘ordinary’, but never really ordinary, lives. The jigsaw brings together darkness and light, questioning and consolation, the large-scale dangers of these Anthropocene times, and the honour and courage it takes to look ordinary life in the eye.
Alex Josephy
Colkitto’s finely crafted poems capture, and distil, the essence of place and of memory.
Geraldine Green
… George Colkitto’s poetry brims with life in all its colours and all its contradictions.
Pippa Little
Ian Marriott’s marvellous poems inhabit rather than observe nature — in fact they do both — but are as much concerned with the human condition. They work in the area of what Hopkins called instress. The voice is calm, contained and precise, as when he watches a Pond Skater, “So perilous / this thin meniscus – / six legs spread out” . The poems too seem to tremble on the water of their vision.
George Szirtes
Two poets, two time zones, two outstanding collections
We’re delighted to invite you to join us for a Sunday of poetry with two compelling poets, Edward Ragg launching And Then the Rain Came, and Omar Sabbagh launching Morning Lit: portals after Alia, on Sunday April @ 12 p.m. (noon UK time — this will be 1 p.m. in n Central Europe, 4 p.m. in Dubai and 8 p.m. in Beijing).
Register for the launch here
The manifestations and properties of water are excitingly explored in Edward Ragg’s new collection. Here are living poems where narrative and lyric work together to contemplate the energies implicit in water. The intriguing emphases laid upon the meanings of the word ‘present’ give a unique edge to the poems. Glass, tears, ice, rivers, wine, salinity, tides: all these elements are woven into the texture of this collection, where the illuminations and fluidities of language are beautifully captured.
Penelope Shuttle
Here is a paean to fatherhood in all its terrifying joy and vulnerability. It evokes the gratitude of the born-again parent, the wonder of being programmed ‘to love unconditionally’, of being compelled to ‘agree, and agree, and agree’, and of acknowledging that one’s love is now one’s ‘only, final fear’. Luminous, tender and gently delirious, Omar Sabbagh’s poems celebrate an awakening into a new sacredness.
Arundhathi Subramaniam
Moments of transformation
Ecology, class, mental health, the determination to not simply manage but transform life, come together in two remarkable collections. Please join us for what will be a memorable event with Jane Monson launching The Chalk Butterfly and Lynn Valentine launching Life’s Stink and Honey on Tuesday May 17 @ 7.30 p.m.
Register for the launch here
Each of Jane Monson’s quietly immersive prose-poems is a light cast on the different facet of a vulnerable, interdependent world. Inanimate things are as charged with sensation and volition as the human minds and bodies that respond, sometimes painfully, to their disorder. This writing leaves us with no choice but to see more clearly; it enables us to care a little more.
Philip Gross
Lynn Valentine is a fearless writer who tackles the great unspeakables head-on – bereavement, loss, childlessness, exile; and yet it’s not death that prevails in these poems, but rather the sovereignty of life and, with all its gifts and with all its heartbreaks, the obstinate beauty of the living world.
John Glenday
Two novels of lies, secrets and mysteries
We’d by thrilled to have you with us for this launch of two gripping novels that bring distinctive stories to love, loyalty, betrayal and secrets, at 7.30 p.m. on Thursday September 29.
Register for the launch here
Jennifer Young’s third Max Falkland novel, A Little Switch, sees Max on a new mission, this time posing as a maid of honour at the Queen’s coronation. Out of her comfort zone with an assignment that reminds her she is the daughter of a viscount, and out of her depth with the silent men in her life, she takes refuge in an archeological expedition, but a chance meeting leads to a trip that will force Max to face the most frightening moments of her career while trying to protect those she loves. The final novel in this Cold War spy trilogy comes to an exciting conclusion. (Cover reveal here and the novel will be available for pre-order in the summer)
In Michelle Angharand Pashley’s Never to Be Told: Paul’s mother abandoned him when he was a baby. Evie’s mother died in a car accident. All Paul knows is what the private investigator told his father twenty-one years ago. Now Evie is a private investigator. And Paul wants to find out what really happened to his mother. There are secrets never to be told. But secrets rarely stay buried and, when the truth begins to surface, who will want to face it? As the disturbing secrets mount, both families will be changed forever.