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We’ve launched a second
premier book club for you. Becoming a
member of our book clubs is an excellent
way of supporting our greatest poets
and short story writers, as well as supporting
Salt's efforts to keep independent literature
thriving.
Michael Murphy's new annotated edition
of major 1930s poet Kenneth Allott
 Kenneth
Allott was born in Glamorgan and educated
in Newcastle and Oxford. Widely regarded
as one of the most promising poets
of the late Thirties, he published
just two volumes in his lifetime, Poems (Hogarth
Press, 1938) and The Ventriloquist’s
Doll (The Cresset Press, 1942).
A posthumous Collected Poems (Secker & Warburg,
1975) gathered his earlier publications
with a selection of unpublished work,
edited by Miriam Allott and Roy Fuller.
In Michael Murphy’s new annotated
edition of the Collected Poems all
Allot’s previously published
work is combined with eighteen new
poems, some of which have only recently
come to light, the whole collection
is introduced and annotated by Murphy
and now represents the most complete
picture of one of the UK’s most
compelling war time poets.
Allott held a position
at Liverpool University from 1948 until
the time of his death in 1973. Allott’s
wife succeeded him as Chair in Modern
English, and in 1978 established the
Kenneth Allott Lecture in Poetry. This Collected
Poems is published in 2008, the
thirtieth anniversary of the Lecture
and the year in which Liverpool is
designated the European Capital of
Culture.
Tim Atkins Folklore reinvents
pastoral lyric poetry
 Folklore is
an ecstatic, dreamlike, and starkly
realist poem sequence which extends,
challenges, and continues the tradition
of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, John Clare’s
visionary lyrics, the elegiac minimalism
of AE Houseman, contemporary work of
Geoffrey Hill, and linguistic innovation
of Gertrude Stein and the language
poets.
Julia Bird debuts with Hannah
and the Monk
 Reading
Julia Bird’s debut collection
of poems is like sorting through the
contents of an up-ended jewellery box.
Here are delicately crafted formal
love poems set with gleaming imagery,
all mixed up with the rhinestone razzle
of looser, noisier poems about urban
myths, history, film and tv. The murkier
side of life is not avoided, but these
musical, consolatory poems are accessible,
inquisitive and ultimately celebratory.
Pam Brown’s new work examines our
period of global instability and military
irruption.
 True
Thoughts follows the success
of Pam Brown’s last major collection Dear
Deliria awarded the NSW Premier’s
Prize for Poetry in 2004. True
Thoughts includes poems of sharply
delineated streetscapes, imagined
havens, distant places, encounters
with friends, ideas, history, and
a kind of fragmented urbanity. Brown’s
writing is deftly ironic, and affects
a sense of the ludicrous in the face
of mortality, as the poems attempt
to fathom the question ‘how to live?’ alongside
the larger one ‘how to live now?’
Going underground with Andrew Duncan
 The
background to Origins of the Underground is
really the story of how British poets
became intellectuals. As they retreated
from inherited and fixed value systems,
they had to think for themselves, and
this was a race which intellectuals
generally won. You can’t just
buy in ideas like a small tropical
country buying jet fighter planes.
What the success of poets seems to
turn on is their willingness to use
ideas which excite the ideas part of
their brains because they are genuinely
unfamiliar. Poets who prefer to stick
to well-worn and inherited arguments,
where they can predict every move,
fail for this reason. The area of nearby
uncertainty has an odd shape. Obviously,
most of the ideas which were new and
risky thirty years ago are now forgotten
— the risk fell to earth, so
to speak. A certain archaeology is
needed to retrieve these “casualty” ideas.
I admit that I enjoy this sort of digging,
and the practice of psychoceramics
(the scientific study of crackpots),
but perhaps this pleasure pursuit is
useful as well. The terrain is made
impassable by deep mutual disagreements
between different groups of poetry
readers (and writers). Going in at
the level of ideas offers a possible
way of easing these disagreements.
Admittedly, it’s very difficult
to find out exactly what they are.
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Published in the last six months
Jump to Salt’s
latest titles from over the last six
months:
Raymond Friel’s evocative and
intimate new collection
 Stations
of the Heart charts an emotional
journey from the anxious landscape
of contemporary England back through
the pieties and vivid recollections
of a childhood in a very different
religious and cultural setting. Through
negotiating the ways of the heart,
its extremes of bliss and despair,
as well as some insights into the
blandness and blankness of the modern
professional heart, the poems arrive
slowly at some sense of the possibility
of resolution and redemption based
on openness to mystery
Tania Hershman’s new book may
be the first short story collection
to be “offset” by planting
a tree for every copy sold.
What links a café in
Antarctica, a factory for producing
electronic tracking tags and a casino
where gamblers can wager their shoes?
They’re among the multiple venues
where award-winning writer Tania Hershman
sets her unique tales in this spellbinding
debut collection.
The author has won
prizes for her stories which have been
widely published in British, American
and international literary journals,
and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
Timed to coincide with London’s
Rothko exhibition, Sue Hubbard’s
tales unite the theme of painting with
the lives of women
 Rothko’s
Red is a collection of ten stories,
subtly linked by painting and art,
about the lives of women: their hopes,
fears, failures and challenges. They
reveal the choices and destinies
of characters from various backgrounds,
embracing the harsh realities of
desire, loss and ageing. Powerful,
yet tender, psychologically intricate
and emotionally perceptive, these
stories examine the complex lives
of modern women. Substantial, moving
and beautifully written they call
upon Sue Hubbard’s wide ranging
knowledge of and feel for art.
Geraldine Monk’s ghostly narratives
add a twist to the sonnet form
 Ghost & Other
Sonnets will disturb and delight.
Divided into three sections the sequence
begins with the Ghost Sonnets. Using
traditional ghost narratives Monk
condenses them into the tightly controlled
sonnet form and twists them into
something totally new. Aficionados
of ghost stories will revel in this
reinvention of a popular genre. In
the second section, & Sonnets
there is a drastic mood change as
personal experience and harrowing
news items root the poems into the
mundane world of everyday existence.
Some of these poems delves into the
dark reality of ‘unnatural’ happenings:
the tragedies of the Beslan massacre
or the Chinese cockle pickers whilst
others rescue the banal and sweep
it off into the realms of the fantastical.
The final section, Other Sonnets
inhabits the cusp between Ghost and
&. Here chance and inexplicable
coincidence meet in the ghostly multiplications
of language.
John Wilkinson’s Down to
Earth is his darkest work to
date …
 John
Wilkinson’s Down to Earth is
his darkest work to date: a disturbing
road poem of the American mid-West,
an epic of migration, an examination
of now-ubiquitous borders, and a meteorological
tour of our growing energy crises.
Global and internal flows of capital,
consumer products, waste, labour and
body parts all shape its contorted
map of the 21st century.
Narrative poems echoing
traditional forms, are intercut with
damaged and damaging lyrics; these
various styles have their analogues
in the sculpture several passages praise
and deprecate. In addition, Down
to Earth incorporates an extended
homage to Artemis of Ephasus.
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