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Rumi, Moonbird : love poems provides a courtship display of rare distinction, combining a compelling uniqueness of voice with insistent imagery and profound sonic beauty. These pieces strut regally before us in sensuous thrall to physical love; but they also soar with all the grace and composure of devotional litera- ture, alert to each sacred updraught from the beloved. This is modern love poetry singing itself to strains of timelessness, its spirited flights of sensibility ever grounded in stillness. Admired for the vitality and innovation of his translations from classical and medieval love poetry (Catullus, Sappho, Hafez), Mario Petrucci here lights up language with the intensities of adoration across its many phases, from the pared crescents of near-word- lessness to consummation's full-rounded soul-song.

Stella Wulf's A Spell in the Woods contains powerful, compelling poems of natural observation: of seeing and listening to the world around us and recreating their second life in language.David MorleyIn A Spell in the Woods, Stella Wulf shows herself to be a worthy successor to Ted Hughes, Mary Oliver and Andrew Young. As a pictorial artist we might not be surprised that she has such a clear-eyed focus upon the natural world, but what an ear she has as well! These are poems that need to be read aloud, and repeatedly, to savour their intricate harmonies. Seemingly timeless, they are all too urgently contemporary in a world we are polluting with 'the silt of entitlement, a flood of insouciance.'David Cooke

This ballad is based on the idea that, in the event of ecological catastrophe, insects such as cockroaches might be most likely to survive and adapt."Even the Human Race So much more loathsome than ourselves I daresay has its place."

Poetry - On placeAll my life I have had a strong affinity for the rivers and hills of Mid-Wales' borderland. Sometimes I played with other children but, at the age of two, my best friend was the Pinsley stream which flowed past our house and, at that time, on through the centre of Leominster town. Street games with their rules, requirements to conform and domination by older kids weren't as exciting as going exploring upstream.The stream was a gentler, much more generous, companion which introduced me to a myriad of creatures and plants. I felt a close kinship with nature and seldom wanted to go indoors or into town. I learned to read the river: safe shallows and shingles, the treachery of silt and still deeps.When I had to start school I suffered terrible separation anxiety. A sand tray and plasticine were poor substitutes for mud and cow pats. It took me a long time to acclimatise to captivity and human-only company. Though I did make friends, I was delighted to get back to the river, the frogs, mayflies and moorhens.As I grew, Mum became increasingly housebound so I found myself becoming her scout reporting on everything I saw on my explorations. My territory was also her childhood territory. She helped me to identify places to visit, and she created a love of observing and naming birds and wild flowers. Her father took her upstream when he fished the Pinsley and Lugg and I shared his passion for water meadows. My aunt once said to my mother, "Do you think she's our dad come back to us?" I longed to be able to fishlike him but no one left in the family had any expertise. Occasionally I was given a brown trout or grayling to cheer Mum up.My father came from Germany and whenever we visited I got very homesick. That was watery border country too but indistinguishable from Holland: flat and ruled by straight roads, straight trees and dykes. The best bits were playing with my cousins on bomb sites under cover of wild spinach and rose bay willowherb. I craved the hills, meanders, twisting hedges and broken-backed willows of home.When we were travelling home in 1963, Dad read Beeching's railway cuts aloud from the paper. The Leominster-to-Kington line that ran past us was to go. I was 7 and panicked. I thought we'd never get home and I'd have to live in a flat, intensively plotted, place. I pined in anticipation of the loss of wildness and the suffocating weight of sky in the absence of hills.Even Herefordshire began to feel too low-lying and farmed. Town was encroaching on country. If there was a chance of a rare car trip I always wanted to go west to the Radnor Forest, to Knighton and Presteigne, places imbued with stories of grandfather as a boy staying up all night in Stapleton Castle to stalk its ghost; sometimes we visited grandmother's childhood homes in the hills around Bishops Castle and at the back of the Long Mynd. Topography talked to me. I loved the rounded, unenclosed hills of bilberry and bracken and hiding in secret cwms.On the way to Barmouth when I was nine, we travelled the hill road from Knighton to Newtown. I made my uncle stop the car on the moors by Cilfaesty Hill, near the source of the Teme and was enthralled. As we dipped down past the then derelict Cider House, on the back of Kerry hill, at the place I now think of as Rowan Ridge, I spotted a raven leaning into the north and knew, instantly, that I wanted to live nearby.Chris Kinsey, 2019

In her version of Europe’s oldest dramatic poem, a requiem to a nation’s dead in a reckless, fruitless war, Kaite O’Reilly chooses the iambic drumbeat of English blank verse, and a long-lined lyricism that befits an epic lament. The language is modern, the word-music timeless, the rhythms ring with echoes of Elizabethan drama. In this powerful translation, the three voices of the Chorus tell the tragic story in a breathless song of mourning that insists on being heard.

Through use of accessible and vivid imagery, infused with David's knowledge of myth and folklore, and crafted with the eye of a playwright and storyteller, the poems in this first collection are brought to another level by experience of personal loss.David Calcutt was born and lives in the West Midlands. He has written many plays for both theatre and radio and published several novels and stories for children, as well as four pamphlets of poetry. This is his first full collection. And is keenly awaited by his current fans.SOME OF HIS PREVIOUS WORK:Poetry: Outlaws (Iron Press), Road Kill and Through the Woods (Fair Acre Press), The Old Man in the House of Bone (V. Press).Novels and Stories: Crowboy, Shadow Bringer, The Map of Marvels, Why the Sea is Salty, The Journey of Odysseus (Oxford University Press), Robin Hood (Barefoot Books).Published plays include: Lady Macbeth, Salem, Beowulf, The Terrible Fate of Humpty Dumpty, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Dracula (Oxford University Press)Broadcast plays include: Paper Doll, The Bogeyman, The Otherworld Child, The Daughter of the Sea, Walker in the Night, Lady of Flowers and Feathers, Over Sea, Under Stone, The Dark is Rising, The Last of the Mohicans, Fahrenheit 451, The Return of the Native (BBC). Theatre Productions include: Ruff Moey, The Ballad of Billy Earp (Theatre Foundry), The Map of Marvels (Pentabus), Assassin of the Sun (Tabard Theatre), Lady Chatterley's Lover, Prospero's Island, The Mothers, The White Shining Land, The Ward, Descent, (Midland Actors Theatre), The Life and Times of the Tat Man, Winter Tales, The Darlaston Dog Fight (Regional Voice Theatre). PREVIOUS REVIEWS:On 'Road Kill'"There is a constant celebration of the seasons and cycles of the life of the countryside. The holistic, biocentric vision widens in the later poems to embrace folklore and mythology. All this in a luminous accessible verse." Keith Sagar - Biographer of Ted Hughes, author of Literature and the Crimes against Nature."I am hugely impressed. By concentrating on the small things, really looking at them, Nadia Kingsley and David Calcutt have managed to articulate something enormous. There is something shamanic, redemptive even, about the progress of the poems into the woods." Katrina Porteous - Poet. Historian. Broadcaster.On 'Through the Woods'"This is a deeply satisfying, layered work that will bear rereading." Jan Fortune, Envoi magazine.On 'The Old Man in the House of Bone'"The Old Man in the House of Bone is a humane and tender account of an old man's mental and physical decline into the final silence. David Calcutt's imagery grows from the page and fixes itself inside the skull. He is a master magician, a seeker of darkness." Helen Ivory - Poet. Visual Artist. Editor of Ink, Sweat & Tears.""Having been a nurse on psycho-geriatric wards everything here rang true, is the best description of the process of dementia I've come across." Sam Smith - Poet. Author. Editor of The Journal.This precise and striking series of poems is both consequential and sequential; each one building on the previous and the following like sediment, creating a brooding and disquieting atmosphere. Calcutt's poetry is alert and surefooted - written with a humane touch, and always compelling." Jane Commane - Poet. Editor/Director of Nine Arches Press.

LONGLISTED for The Saboteur Awards BEST ANTHOLOGY 2018This anthology, of new poetry and art about Britain's urban birds, grew out of the close encounters I have had with birds when visiting central London from my home on the Shropshire-Wales border. I noticed how much closer I could get to blackbirds and other shy birds there. I noticed the number of people with headphones to their ears, and phones in front of their eyes. I thought about the joy I get from watching birds and how at my lowest times their constancy, their flight and their song have enlivened me.You will see from the contents page that only a sample of birds seen in Britain's towns and cities are included, and that there are a particularly large number of responses to both pigeons and gulls. I like this. These are the birds the poets and artists who took part in this project responded to. I have chosen work I hope you will enjoy - whether you are an expert or novice in poetry, art, or ornithology.At www.fairacrepress.co.uk you can read the blogs I wrote on urban birds to encourage people to pick up a pen or paintbrush. There you can also download or stream six free podcasts: conversations and readings featuring my favourite UK nature poets: Alison Brackenbury, Gillian Clarke, Chris Kinsey, David Morley, Katrina Porteous and Richard Osmond. You can also join naturalist BrettWestwood and myself on an urban bird walk podcast in Stourbridge, West Midlands.I would particularly like to thank the poets I commissioned to write a bird poem who are not known for, or used to, writing about nature: Brian Bilston, Carrie Etter, Andrew McMillan, Sabrina Mahfouz, Kaite O'Reilly, Emma Purshouse, Amaal Said, James Sheard and Dorothea Smartt. And my sincere thanks go to Arts Council England.

WINNER of The Saboteur Awards Best Anthology of 2018This book came straight out of a long thread on Deborah Alma's Facebook page in October 2017. Something was released and given a space within social media. Many women felt emboldened by this to share more difficult stories, more details. As a poet, and an editor, it felt natural to Deborah to collect these stories somehow and it was obvious to collect them as poems. This collection contains mainly previously unpublished work from 80 of our finest poets:Jill Abram, Vasiliki Albedo, Deborah Alma, Jean Atkin, Roberta Beary, Victoria Bennett, Kaddy Benyon, Ama Bolton, Jhilmil Breckenridge, Rachel Buchanan, Jane Burn, Rachel Burns, Cath Campbell, Louisa Campbell, Zelda Chappel, Rachael Clyne, Jane Commane, Meg Cox, Sarah Doyle, Pat Edwards, Alicia Fernández, Rona Fitzgerald, Kate Garrett, Kathy Gee, Georgi Gill, Roz Goddard, Linda Goulden, Vicky Hampton, Sue Hardy-Dawson, Deborah Harvey, Ramona Herdman, AM Hill, Clare Hill, Angi Holden, Rhiannon Hooson, Helen Ivory, Sheila Jacob, Sally Jenkinson, Jemima Laing, Gill Lambert, Dorianne Laux, Claire Leavey, Emma Lee, Liz Lefroy, Pippa Little, Mandy Macdonald, Maggie Mackay, Holly Magill, Sabrina Mahfouz, Sarah Miles, Sarah Mnatzaganian, Kim Moore, Abegail Morley, Helen Mort, Katrina Naomi, Lisa Oliver, Michelle Penn, Pascale Petit, Bethany W Pope, clare e potter, Wendy Pratt, Lesley Quayle, Kathleen M. Quinlan, Amy Rainbow, Natalie Rees, Jess Richards, Victoria Richards, Bethany Rivers, Rosie Sandler, Jacqueline Saphra, Elisabeth Sennitt Clough, Emily Sernaker, Emma Simon, Beth Somerford, Ruth Stacey, Judi Sutherland, Angela Topping, Cathy Whittaker, Natalie Whittaker, Stella Wulf.