Shannon Tharp, The Cost of Walking
79 pages. ISBN 978-1-907489-06-8
Praise for Shannon Tharp:
We live in a condition of weather, a fact so blatant that we are startled to be reminded that this is, inescapably, the human condition. There is also the weather within, mood of the mind, as it confronts the weather without. These poems discover and confront one sort of weather: gray skies, an all-over overcast condition. In doing so they also discover and confront a question: if less is more, then what about least? Poetry, in contrast to prose and so called ordinary discourse, can be thought of as "less words." A poetry of least words is a conscious raising of the stakes in the gamble that is any poem. A risk, a risk taking. The risk is that gray may turn out to be just and only that. Hopelessly entangled in ambiguity, hopelessly lost, brought to a stand still. The composer Gorecki once interrupted an academic symposium to strike a single note on a piano and point out that it, too, was a chord. His interruption commanded attention. Likewise these poems, though in a completely nondramatic fashion. They are "interruptions" in a quiet voice, and therein resides their authority. Shannon Tharp is to be commended for taking the risk of finding a chord—under and over tones, inner voicings—when the weather seems to offer and enforce only reduction. It takes courage to confront weather, not to deny it, and to attempt something other than that. Both come at a cost. (This collection's title is not incidental.) Her poems merit attention.
John Taggart
Reviews
Review by Sally Delehant
Review by Alan Baker
Review by David Caddy
Sample Poem
Ordering
UK Orders: The Cost of Walking £8.95 (including postage)
US Orders: The Cost of Walking $15.00 (including postage)
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What Shape Sound
John Phillips, What Shape Sound
110 pages. ISBN 978-1-907489-04-4
110 pages. ISBN 978-1-907489-04-4
The poems in John Phillips's What Shape Sound pose questions about how we perceive the world through language and the senses. Deftly weaving together details of the external world with reflections on the thought processes and on the nature of words, this collection confirms Phillips as one the most engaging exponents of the short poem in English.
Praise for John Phillips:
Phillips has discovered the fact that words, like all others things—those which are natural around us, as well as the things/symbols that we create for our own convenience—have a life of their own. He has respect for that simple, and usually ignored, fact.
Theodore Enslin, First Intensity
The poem for Phillips is a machine capable of examining the ambiguities within its own constituent parts. Just as the Language Poets vigorously interrogated the hidden structures of language through poetry, Phillips explores the luggage concealed in names and the act of naming ... It is this which Phillips most rigorously explores in these tightly wound poems—the elusive and inherently negative otherness concealed in every act of linguistic indication.
Richard Owens, Rain Taxi
Phillips has developed the mastery, so he can improvise from it—with impunity—as Chopin improvised after a thorough grounding in The Well-Tempered Clavichord and Mozartian sonata form. It is the improvisation of a master not the improvisation of an apprentice.
Clive Faust, Jacket
Reviews
Review by Steve Spence
Review at Cornish Literature
Review by Patrick James Dungan
Sample Poem
Ordering
UK Orders: What Shape Sound £8.95 (including postage)
US Orders: What Shape Sound $15.00 (including postage)
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Variations on Painting a Room
Alan Baker, Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010
210 pages. ISBN 978-1-907489-05-1
Variations on Painting a Room brings together ten years of small press publications by the poet Alan Baker, together with two uncollected sequences, "The Book of Random Access" and "Everyday Songs".
Praise for Alan Baker:
Elizabeth Bishop wrote "The three qualities I admire in the poetry I like best are: Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery". These are the qualities I find in Alan Baker's poems. The precise particulars that create a very real, clear and believable writing, a willingness to take risks, and an awareness that what matters is not to be found in the obvious but in the half glimpsed, half said, half understood. Equally admirable are the ambitions for what writing can possibly do. Right from the first prose poem in "Not Bondi Beach" to the long poem "A Lull" in that same book, "The Cardiac Diaries" in his "Hotel February" collection, and on to the larger sequences such as "The book of Random Access", Baker spreads out an awareness of the working moving world, and its politics, around him, around all of us.
Lee Harwood
Baker represents an alternative ("other") British poetry tradition, and poetics, that, often quietly, in the so-called margins of a mainstream, continues to do excellent work. His work ... turns the British lyric subtly, and offers new angles on how a line may be shaped, or allowed to spin off in another direction.
Todd Swift
'[It] is the recording of people's memories.' I don't think so. 'It's only a piece of make believe': the narrator says so, later on. And yet, and yet ... Of course these fantastic texts are made up, are just randomly accessed words assembled on the page, each section under a black and white hexagram. But they are subtle, delicate (but tough) evocations of the confused lives we live, seemingly confessional outpourings, full of surprising and alarming images and insights. These texts work by luring the reader in, by being so transparent that we believe them. The details and declamations entwine themselves into sense, the everyday phrases bump and jostle themselves into a momentary order that offers teaching and insight. There is no ego here, no polemic or rant, just an intersection and gathering of lived moments, each under the spotlight for a brief moment of time. 'Let's sit down at the table together and talk softly into the night'. Okay, let's. Perhaps you will read to me, grant me random access to your world.
Rupert Loydell (on "The Book of Random Access")
Reviews
Review by Ian Seed
Review by Peter Riley
Sample Poem
Ordering
UK Orders: Variations on Painting a Room £10.95 (including postage)
US Orders: Variations on Painting a Room $17.00 (including postage)
