Vault is David Rose’s first novel although he has been writing and placing stories in literary magazines for [...]]]> If you’re wondering what reading to pack for your summer getaway, perhaps the latest review of David Roses’s Vault will help you decide. ‘A confident, ambitious, and thoughtful debut’ writes Christopher Burns in the Warwick Review.

Vault is David Rose’s first novel although he has been writing and placing stories in literary magazines for the past twenty years (his story ‘Flora’ was highlighted in the Times‘s review of The Best British Short Stories 2011). Christopher Burns describes how it marries military, sporting and thriller elements, ‘rather as if the spirit of John le Carre has been taken over by BS Johnson.’ And indeed it does! Cycling, cold-war espionage, and a third-party novelist attempting to re-write the plot combine to create an unputdownable read, perfect for these long summer days.

Vault is vailable from good bookshops or from our on-line shop.

Summer reading? Sorted!

Taking its title from Chretien De Troyes’ twelfth-century Arthurian romance, Erec & Enide moves through a vibrant, rich and playful mix of underhand lyric. A deceptive and light-footed vulnerability unexpectedly folds in on itself to throw up [...]]]> Today sees the publication of four new Salt Modern Voices pamphlets:

Erec & Enide by Amy De’Ath

Taking its title from Chretien De Troyes’ twelfth-century Arthurian romance, Erec & Enide moves through a vibrant, rich and playful mix of underhand lyric. A deceptive and light-footed vulnerability unexpectedly folds in on itself to throw up the most serious questions; then resolutely refuses to ‘make sense’ of things. These modern love poems wear their ideologically saturated state on their sleeve, and are all the more loving for that.

Orchids by J.T. Welsch

The poems of Orchids spring from the margins of contemporary masculinity. A rich undercurrent of melancholy and desire seethes beneath the cool rhetorical playfulness of these lyrical monologues, as anguished speakers face the unfeasibility of confession. The ghosts of a shared cultural imagination also haunt these “stifling” and skewed domestic spaces: Caravaggio’s castrated head of Goliath confronts existential crisis in an airport hotel shower. Dead gay film icons explain themselves by invoking Superman comics and Dostoevsky. A love poem beginning with familiar sentiments takes refuge among phantom victims of the Reign of Terror. Beyond such fantastic flights and metamorphoses, Orchids remains most troubled by the everydayness of its melodramas, so that the physical act of washing up inspires a set of meditations on the self and body, a creeping weed and the man from the phone company each pose some unspeakable threat, and an innocent bit of teenage cross-dressing gives way to an irreconcilable sense of loss.

Last Farmer by Shaun Belcher

From urban nature poems, to noir nightmares, Adrian Slatcher’s collection provides a new take on our globalised experience, seeing us as small parts in “a colossal machine.” The poems are about the modern city, particularly Manchester, with all it’s complexities, and absurdities. Addresses Contemporary subjects – from iPods to Starbucks, from Facebook to global warming.

These two dozen poems are never slight, and always repay re-reading, almost metaphysical in their warping of our recognisable realities.

A cycle of poems [...]]]> Walking along a woodland track one Sunday afternoon to look at some ancient earthworks typical of many sprinkled around the English countryside, I had little idea that I was embarking on a poetry project that would take the best part of seven years – more if you count late stragglers.

A cycle of poems in three ‘movements’ set in prehistoric East Anglia, Flatlands was published in September, but, like the region’s terrain, its way was often marshy and fogbound. I’d been interested in the pre-Roman era long before the collection was conceived, and the first poems were really random pieces in search of a voice and style. It was when I started to visit sites such as Norfolk’s Grime’s Graves and the Flag Fen excavations in Cambridgeshire on a vague quest to find cohesion for those initial efforts that the idea of a structured sequence began to gel.

For anyone who hasn’t been there, Grime’s Graves is a stunning place to visit – a moonscape of grassy craters which are the sunken tops of disused mineshafts filled in by flint miners who dug out the rich bedrock four or five thousand years ago. The area itself is a bleak, majestic heathland, but the most astonishing quality for me is that, as you climb down a shaft that’s open to the public, and peer into the narrow underground galleries where the miners crawled, the place is so intact that you can almost imagine the workers packing up their tools – pick-axes made of antlers, shovels fashioned from the shoulder blades of oxen – at the end of a shift the day before.

It was with such people in mind – early farmers, tribal warriors, villagers in their smoke-filled roundhouses – that the cycle started to find its narrative rhythm, and the idea developed of a stripped language that could speak for a time when there were no written records. I thought of voices rising out of the landscape, hinting at their stories, their experiences, then fading like ghosts back into the woods and fenlands. With the cycle spanning more than 2,000 years from the late Stone Age to the Roman invasion and Boudica’s rebellion, I had two main intentions: first, to try to dramatise the lives of these remote ancestors and, second, that the poems, in large part, could be read as metaphors of our own emotional existence.

Perhaps the most important early piece was ‘Thames Idol’, positioned near the start of the cycle and essentially the poem that sets the overall metaphorical theme. In Colchester’s imposing Castle Museum, built on the foundations of the Romans’ Temple of Claudius that inflamed the local tribespeople, one of the prize exhibits is the so-called Dagenham Idol, a battered pinewood figure that has been radiocarbon dated to around 2,500BCE . One of the oldest human representations found in the country, it’s almost like a child’s doll, though the expert consensus seems to veer towards some sort of fertility symbol. While the figure’s gender is ambiguous, the poem’s voice is that of a female god who tells the reader to ‘Find me in your own time/find me in your own face’.

Flag Fen, which spawned a small grouping of poems in the middle of the collection, is an impressive archaeological site with reconstructed roundhouses. At first glance the excavations are a mish-mash of sodden bits of wood being teased out of the mud. However, the timbers have revealed a hugely ambitious structure – a kilometre-long defended causeway built during the Bronze Age when farmers sought to protect their pastures from neighbouring groups as rising waters encroached on the land. A vast timber platform, described by the site’s excavators as being the size of Wembley Stadium, took the defences across a stretch of water. As with many other lakes and rivers, the site seems to have been viewed as a sacred place, and it has yielded an array of jewellery and weapons apparently deposited as ritual offerings.

Many of the Flatlands pieces are imagined tableaux rather than being site-specific: refugees from the Belgic tribes of Gaul crossing in their boats to England; ‘cattle watchers’ following trackways; a graveyard where the dead are left in the open to be taken by animals, their bones picked by birds. Other poems witness a widow’s grief beside the funeral pyre of Iron Age king Addedomaros, whose burial site may have been the Lexden Tumulus in Essex; villagers of the Iceni tribe from the Norfolk/Suffolk region as they face a cruel winter; captured tribespeople on their way to be sold on the continental mainland as slaves.

Camulodunum, the proto-urban community where Colchester now stands and where Boudica brought her warring hordes to settle scores against its Roman occupiers, is the backdrop for the final grouping of poems. This heavily fortified Iron Age complex with its farms and industries was the seat of Cunobelin – Shakespeare’s Cymbeline – a powerful king who appears to have held sway over large parts of south-east England. Running through the settlement, which would have been a thriving market place before and after the Roman invasion, was the River Colne where boats brought raw materials for all the workshops – tile makers, smithies, leather producers and so on.

A pair of remarkably preserved tombstones of two soldiers who served in the Roman occupation army are housed at Colchester’s museum. One, found in 1868, is of a centurion, the other, discovered in the 1920s, is that of a cavalry officer from Thrace, in the region of modern-day Bulgaria. It is thought that the stones might have been desecrated during Boudica’s revolt. Two partner poems under the collective title ‘On the Street of Tombs’ are based on the carvings, which, for the book’s purposes, offered a personalised slant on the invasion. It’s ironic that two of the earliest individuals pictured in the country, and whose names we happen to know, are not native Britons but part of the force that came to subjugate them.

The cycle’s bloody climax sees the enslaved population working to build the Temple of Claudius watched by the ‘dead eyes’ of compatriots who have paid the price of rebellion with their heads. Boudica then faces, in a moment of dark contemplation, what could be her last battle at an unknown site as she stands ready to ‘flay the legions’.

The setting of the final poem, ‘Blackwater’, is an Essex estuary where the voices of the cycle, which at the start are embodied in the literally earthbound flint miners, now dissolve ‘out of sound’ into the sea and sky.

Flatlands link:

http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844715565.htm

Victor Tapner interviewed by Sheenagh Pugh:

http://blog.saltpublishing.com/2010/09/30/interview-with-victor-tapner-in-interview-with-sheenagh-pugh/

Sheenagh Pugh’s review of Flatlands on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk

Victor Tapner’s website:

http://www.victortapner.com

Data Trace

“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only [...]]]> Ronnie McGrath on

Data Trace

“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text.”

-George Perec

Perhaps it is a healthy thing, but poetry today remains divided and reflects the plethora of different voices which are all struggling to occupy, what the scholar Stuart Hall terms, the sites of popular position. However, in this jockeying for a preeminent place, the fetish of realism prevails as the dominant mode of representation in poetry, and as such, tends to suppress other forms of writing that do not engage in ‘logical’ ways of knowing and being in the world.

In such a highly conservative space with its entrenched literary traditions, it seems to me that a poetry which does not take stock of the cultural moment i.e. one that is characterized by hybridity and experimentation, is stifling the rich and vibrant possibilities of new expressions that keeps poetry alive. Of course, it would be foolish to suggest that realist poetry is an outmoded form, but I can’t help feeling that a lot of today’s poets have taken what I believe is a lazy literary essentialist approach to their writing.  That is to say, very few indeed are those of us who are willing to employ anti-illusionistic strategies to our poetry and embrace abstraction as another dimension of ‘reality’. It is in this sense that I consider the continued taken-for-grantedness of a realist mode as less to do with aesthetic choice and more to do with what I believe, and have said earlier, is the consequence of lazy literary essentialism.

I have always wanted much more from poetry than just a reflection of a reality which I knew was highly constructed, and Data Trace, my latest collection of poems, is a product of my interest in surrealism, expressionism, feminism, Afro-futurism, the Blues, Beat and the aesthetics of Jazz. In the realm of music, innovators such as John Coltrane, Sun Ra and Jimi Hendrix, to mention but a few, have shown me how to employ a disruptively experimental style to my work with the effect of making it not just a reflection of ‘reality’ but constituting a reality within itself.

As a consequence my writing is often associated with the work of black experimental writers and poets such as Will Alexander, Clarence Major, Nathaniel Mackey, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, The Last Poets and Anthony Joseph. Among many other things, (an interest in moving beyond the confines of ‘blackness’ springs to mind), what seems to cohere us as a group is a serious commitment to maintaining the tradition of improvisation in our art and performance. In this sense, and something I would like to see established amongst my fellow poets in Britain who either share the same or a similar aesthetic, is the importance of collaboration as integral to the development of a vibrant scene.

I would like to believe that my work, as demonstrated in Data Trace, is part of a poetry in an industry that has finally grown up and can now engage with the type of aesthetics, that for far too long now, have been absent in the realm of ‘Black’ British poetry.

Came just at the right time to see the Christmas business. Lots of promotions to do, people to contact, books to mail out, blog entries to compose. It is great fun to put into [...]]]> We are two international MA Publishing students from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge currently working at Salt as publishing assistants.

Came just at the right time to see the Christmas business. Lots of promotions to do, people to contact, books to mail out, blog entries to compose. It is great fun to put into practice what we learn at the MA program in theory.

Who is Kim?
Kim has just moved to England in August of 2010. You might ask me where I am from and that is exactly the one question I have the most problems with. Yes, I do have a German passport. I  speak German and American native. I lived on four continents so far. I moved 21 times in my life which gives me an average of not even two years in any one place. Sometimes, those moves were in the same town, but sometimes as far as 9400 kilometres. So where am I from? When I cannot answer that question, some people ask me where my parents live and say that surely I consider myself at home there. Actually, I don’t because I never lived in those houses. So where am I from then? Cambridge, of course! My husband is there, my dog Mozart is there, all my things are there, thus I must be from there. I like the MA program and I like it even better to have been given an opportunity to work with Salt. There is so much to learn and sometimes I wish I could just plug into Chris’ head and download all that information. Wouldn’t that be opportune? If you ever develop that kind of technology, let me know. That would certainly be worth publishing!

Who is Teresa?

After working in Editorial Marketing for one and a half years in Lisbon, I decided to move to Cambridge to study Publishing and work in this field. First thing I noticed was the weather. Did it have to rain so much? Well, we can’t have it all. Might as well just get familiar with the city and start to get to know the people. I am a member of the Apex magazine made by students for students, and am also a Student Ambassador at Anglia Ruskin University. My first article for Apex was a Portuguese recipe for Christmas. I have a blog of my own where I usually post some pictures of the places that I go to, meals that I cooked, people I met so that my family and friends can see what I am up to. After 2 months of living in Cambridge, Salt Publishing welcomed me with lots of tea and I am now having a great time learning how a book is processed from the beginning until its delivery to bookshops.

We?ve moved offices to London.

Our new address is

Salt Publishing Ltd Fourth floor 2 Tavistock Place Bloomsbury LONDON WC1H 9RA