blog.saltpublishing.com » Sarah-Jayne

Will Stone Reading at Uni-verse International Poetry Group

Sarah-Jayne — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 15:01:31 +0000

Wednesday 9th March 2011

1pm-2.30pm / Visitors welcome £4 : Members £2

Will Stone, poet and literary translator, will be reading poems from his international prize-winning collection Glaciation (Salt 2007) and discussing the art of translating poetry at the Uni-verse International Poetry Group. Soft drinks will be provided, please bring your own snacks/sandwiches. Held at Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution, 16-18 Queen Square, Bath BA1 2HN.

For more information please telephone 01225 837251 or check out the website page here.

Jared Randall’s Apocryphal Road Code Reviewed

Sarah-Jayne — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 10:00:42 +0000

The first thing you’ll note about Jared Randall’s debut poetry book, Apocryphal Road Code, is the striking cover design: a grey-toned mesmerizing close-up of a bearded man staring straight into your soul. The image is split vertically between the front and back covers, perhaps denoting the duality in Randall’s poems, which invoke both a personal and a historical perspective on the hobo’s wayfaring life. As he points out in “Thinking, road kids…,” we are all hobo’s on life’s highway, always a heartbeat from despair. [...] Randall’s poetic voice is lyrical and descriptive.

- Rick Dale

Read the full review on Rick Dale’s blog here.

Apocryphal Road Code is available to buy NOW.

Waterloo Poem Restoration Video

Sarah-Jayne — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:18:56 +0000

Sue Hubbard’s Eurydice has now been fully restored in the Waterloo underpass. Check out award-winning film maker Jonas Grimas’ video about the restoration by following this link:

Sue Hubbard’s Eurydice from jonas grimas on Vimeo.

Sue also read Eurydice in full and discussed the restoration of her poem in the tunnel at Waterloo on BBC Radio 3′s The Verb on Friday 21st January which you can still catch on the BBC iplayer.

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, art critic and novelist. She has published several collections of poetry, short stories, a novel and a recent book of art criticism. Details can be found at: www.suehubbard.com

Restoration Of The Much Loved Waterloo Poem

Sarah-Jayne — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 10:00:23 +0000

After a year-long campaign London’s largest public art poem, which was painted over last autumn by Network Rail, is about to be restored in the underpass at Waterloo that leads to the IMAX cinema

Ten years ago, as part of the renovation of the South Bank undertaken by Avery Architects, the Arts Council and the BFI commissioned the award-winning poet and art critic Sue Hubbard to write a poem for the underpass that leads from Victory Arch at Waterloo Station to the IMAX cinema. Written in a series of three-lined stepped stanzas the poem was set out so that it could be read whilst walking through the tunnel. Using the metaphor of Eurydice descending into the underworld it aimed to make walkers feel safe. As well as the classical myth, the poem’s imagery makes reference to London’s Thameside history and to the famous Waterloo clock, a meeting point in so many British films.

As an example of innovative public art it has been written about in architectural journals and was the subject of a commissioned essay from Sue Hubbard by The Poetry Society, Opening Spaces, written during her residency as The Poetry Society’s only Public Art Poet. It formed the back drop to a National Film School production will you forget me? (Stephen Bennet) and Lifelines, a Channel 4 drama produced by Carnival films. The poem has also been requested on Radio 4’s Poetry Please.

Last autumn Time Out listed it as one of the best ‘secret’ things to look out for in London. Within two weeks Network Rail had painted it over whilst ‘cleaning’ up the tunnel. A huge press outcry followed. The story was covered in The Guardian, The Spectator, Time Out, The Evening Standard, and Poetry News and was even given a ten minute slot on Canadian Radio.

Christopher Hamilton-Emery, the director of Salt publishing that publishes Sue Hubbard’s collection Ghost Station, in which the poem appears, began a Facebook campaign. The response was phenomenal. More than 1200 people signed up demanding the restoration of the poem. One man said he proposed as a result of seeing it, while a mother spoke movingly of receiving comfort from reading it on the way to the hospital to see her terminally ill daughter.

Without any initial money, and the generous help of a volunteer lawyer and treasurer from the Facebook campaign, it was possible, after protracted negations, to get Network Rail to agree to its reinstatement. A thousand pounds was raised on Facebook and the rest of the money is being generously donated by risk management software provider, Neural Technologies. The poem will retain the original font but will be executed in a different colour because of the new background paint now in the tunnel. Restoration is being undertaken by James Salisbury of the City and Guilds Art School.

This has been a triumph for popular opinion. This much loved and much read poem – London’s largest public art poem – is being put back by public demand due to the persistence of those who believe in the role of poetry and public art.

Sue will be reading the poem in full on BBC Radio 3′s The Verb on Friday 21st January.

Tony Williams Interviews Tim Dooley about his latest Salt Book

Sarah-Jayne — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 13:23:20 +0000

Tim Dooley’s Imagined Rooms collects many of the poems first published in the 1980s with a number of other poems hitherto unpublished in book form. It’s quietly wonderful, and speaks to anyone conscious of the absurdity of living halfway between the private and public worlds. Tim kindly agreed to answer my questions about the book.

Many of the poems in Imagined Rooms were originally collected in The Interrupted Dream in 1985. How does it feel to see them back in print?

I hope the ones I’ve used stand up. I’ve chosen poems that I think will work in today’s context and there’s been a certain amount of nip and tuck along the way.

The book’s epigraph is a wonderful quote from Neruda which talks about ‘the used surfaces of things’, adding ‘let our poetry be like them’. It’s an apt epigraph because the poems have been at large, being used, for 25 years. But it’s also apt because it seems to me you’re interested in writing a poetry of used items, suburbs and disappointments. Is that fair?

Yes. Neruda sees impurity as in the nature of things and I’ve long felt a commitment to the world as it is – rather than a transformed or purified vision of it, though I can see a place for that too. But I certainly subscribe to the idea of the poem as a made thing, marked by human touch and that’s affected the formal side of the work as much as the content. There’s an everyday quality to the work, starting from what’s in front of you and the language you hear around you, but shaping that into something more challenging.

Check out the full interview on Tony’s blog: Interview with Tim Dooley

Both Tony William’s The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street and Tim Dooley’s Imagined Rooms are available to buy now.

Help someone find their way in on National Poetry Day

Sarah-Jayne — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:17:34 +0000

Tony Williams says we shouldn’t blush to help people discover poems

Earlier in the year I had the strange experience of buying a new book of poems (John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, as it happens), and discovering from the distributor’s slip left inside that it had stood on the shelf in the bookshop, waiting for me to buy it, for nearly 18 years. It showed how slowly a bookseller’s stock can move, and how poetry in particular often needs a little shove before it flies off the shelves. (You can read more about the incident and the wonderful bookshop involved here.)

At the time, I said, ‘The more I think about it, the more grateful I am that such things can happen.’ And there is something miraculous about it – but also heartbreaking. What is it with poetry that keeps it shut up in books and bookshelves and publishers’ spare rooms and – conceivably – warehouses?

That’s a question that occupies a fair amount of time in the poetry world. Adrian Mitchell famously answered that ‘Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’. But that answer makes me uncomfortable: it plays the blame game, as if the wrong sort of poetry is being written (what would the right sort be?). It implies that poetry should prettify itself to attract those who aren’t interested – there’s an assumption hanging around in the background here that anyone who might want to read poetry is already doing it, and all the rest couldn’t give a stuff.

This view of the relation between readers and poetry puts a depressing slant on events like National Poetry Day, which aim to connect more readers and audiences to the poetry they aren’t yet reading. If they aren’t interested, if it isn’t ‘relevant’ to them, what’s the point?

But that’s not what National Poetry Day (which happens on Thursday, 7^th October) is about. There’s another answer to that question of why poetry languishes on the shelf, which says that people are interested, but they don’t know where to start. They’re a bit scared of poetry, and they don’t think they’re invited anyway. Sometimes I’ve had non-poetry people respond to my poems by saying, ‘I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I understood it,’ to which I always reply, ‘There’s nothing to understand. If you enjoyed it, that’s enough. That’s all a poem does.’ (Which isn’t really true, but it’s more true than anything else I could say.) That response, which I think other poets would recognise, lays bare the barrier that exists between poetry and readers. People (hesitantly) read a poem. They enjoy it. But they don’t think that’s enough.

It’s just fear; or call it being intimidated, or feeling like you need permission. And what National Poetry Day, all those readings and workshops and launches and odd, wonderful, hare-brained happenings, aims to do, is to give people permission, for one day at least, to read poetry.

Another thing I often hear people say is, ‘I’d like to read some poetry, but I don’t know where to start.’ With fiction, you can at least start with the bestseller lists; but then you’ve probably been reading fiction in some form or other for much of your life: you have reference points, you have books you know you like. But the only poetry you’ve read may have been at school, and you probably didn’t like it much (you were being assessed on it, so it probably seemed quite important to ‘get’ it). People need a way in to poetry, a square one. And that’s pretty easy to give them.

One of the simplest things you can do on National Poetry Day (or any day, in fact, but let’s start here) is just to recommend a book of poetry to a friend (or family member, or colleague, or random stranger in the street – but don’t hold me responsible for that one). Look them up and down and think of a book of poems that tickled you, and if you think it might tickle them too, tell them about it. Title, author, why it’s good. It’ll take two minutes of your time.

There’s a thing on Facebook, where you put a couple of lines of poetry in your status for National Poetry Day. That’ll be fun, but not actually terribly inviting for those not in the know. Instead, I’m going to put a clear recommendation for a book of poems (and a link to where it can be bought) – probably Chris McCabe’s Shad Thames, Broken Wharf, since that’s what’s got me excited in the last few days.

People talk about last night’s telly all the time. Why shouldn’t they talk about last night’s poetry too? On National Poetry Day, invite someone into poetry – they probably would have come in before, they just didn’t know which door to use. You might feel a little bit pushy, telling them about this great book you’ve read; but maybe a little push is exactly what they want.

-Tony Williams

Buy Tony’s The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street here.

Win a Signed Copy of The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street

Sarah-Jayne — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:32:28 +0000

Salt author Tony Williams is running a competition to win a signed copy of his latest collection The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street.

Check out his blog for more details: http://aye-lass.blogspot.com/2010/09/competition-win-copy-of-my-book.html

A winner will be drawn from a hat on Friday 17th September 2010. Good luck!

Cliff Yates and Sian Hughes Reviewed

Sarah-Jayne — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:49:11 +0000

We were looking at her poem ‘Bear-Awareness and Self-Defence Classes’ (subtitled ‘Or Fathers and Husbands’). Like many of Siân’s poems it is short and made of words and sentences an eight-year old could read. But while its subject matter is about what happens to some children, it is absolutely not a poem for all children.[...] Like being winded. Like waking up in a sweat. Like the air leaving the room. The point of this poem about domestic violence (as I read it) is the control with which it is executed, through the simple-looking but deadly metaphor of wild bears. Painful subject matter has been rendered truthfully and (apparently) artlessly, with no poetical high flourish and certainly no moralising. The unstated words of comfort implicit in the poem iterate in nothing more than a whisper that by being truthful, by using song to describe our suffering we can overcome what threatens to overcome us.

[...] Reading Cliff’s poems is a bit like watching the best kind of slapstick comedy: each gag is inevitable, hilarious and sad all at once. In Cliff’s poems you see the wooden plank on the shoulder of one man as it spins around, misses his friend as he ducks out of the way then catches him in the face on the return circuit. What Cliff also shows us, and this is what give the poems a special kind of resonance, is the following shot where you can catch the same man scrabbling around on the floor, looking for a contact lens, perhaps, or perhaps just scrabbling around on the floor. Like Siân, Cliff does not moralise or attempt to persuade us what this might mean. – Anthony Wilson

Check out the full review here

The Short and The Long of It: Andrew Philip interviews Tania Hershman

Sarah-Jayne — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:28:48 +0000

Andrew Philip has posted a fantastic interview with Tania Hershman on his blog Tonguefire.

Please do check it out here: http://wp.me/pBKHO-gJ

Andrew Philip’s The Ambulance Box and Tania Hershman’s The White Road and Other Stories are both available NOW from our online store.

Triple Book Launch

Sarah-Jayne — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:02:47 +0000

Thursday 8th July 2010

Join Agnieszka Studzinska, David Briggs and Mark Granier at The Phoenix Artist Club, Charing Cross, London to celebrate the launch of their fantastic new poetry collections, Snow Calling, The Method Men and Fade Street.

The event starts at 7pm and is free.

Please do check out The Phoenix Artist Club website for directions: http://www.phoenixartistclub.com/aboutus.html

Remember to keep checking your local Salt Cellars page for all the latest events happening in your area.

These great titles are available now from our online store with 20% off.