Smokestack Books

Smokestack champions poets who are unconventional, unfashionable, radical or left-field and who are working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority.

Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word.

Smokestack believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society.

Smokestack does not think "difficulty" in poetry is a virtue or that poetry is a place in which to hide.

Smokestack argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry.

"Smokestack has a great squad of radical poets lined up for its first season. I predict that the team will roll like thunder, strike like lightening and electrify British poetry."

Adrian Mitchell

---

Summer Poetry from Smokestack

Granny Albyn's Complaint

It is 1st May, and we are among the "fair field full of folk" gathered on Glasgow Green to celebrate May Day. On every side are Chartists and Suffragettes, trades unionists and Communists, tourists and film-crews, artists and asylum seekers, the homesick and the homeless, the long-time-dead and the yet-to-be-born. Helen Crawfurd and John Maclean are here, so are Edwin Muir, Ronald Stevenson and Edwin Morgan, Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Robeson and Nelson Mandela, Matt McGinn and St Mungo, a chorus of voices coming together in dialogue and potential unity in the Dear Green Place that is - or might be - Glasgow. Granny Albyn's Complaint is a love-letter to the city where David Betteridge has spent the best part of his life. Lyrical, narrative, satiric and reflective, his poetry celebrates the city's radical political and artistic traditions, in despair and hope, struggle and advance, continuity and loss, and all the lovely flarings-up of human achievement. Green thoughts in a red shade.

"There is more to Socialism than a hatred of capitalism - though that is not a bad starting point. But love is more fundamental to the Socialist spirit than any other single factor. This is why I like very much this selection of poems by David Betteridge." Jimmy Reid

More about Granny Albyn's Complaint

Several Forms of Speech: new, early, escaped and last poems

Several Forms of Speech brings together poems written by the distinguished poet Arnold Rattenbury over a sixty year period. The earliest was published on the eve of D-Day; the last was written as part of the campaign to save the Community Hospital in Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales, where Rattenbury lived. These poems are written in many different voices - public and private, personal and political, lyrical and satirical. Some are new, others are uncollected or from unfinished books. An extract from a verse-play rubs shoulders with a chapter from an unpublished verse novel. Idiosyncratic, technically brilliant and eloquent with passionate anger, Several Forms of Speech features a cast of painters and paintings, clowns and mummers, friends and foes. It's a book about art and love, empire and war, faith and community. And it is a reaffirmation of the necessity of Revolution.

More about Several Forms of Speech.

---

Smokestack at Aldeburgh

Ellen Phethean will be at the Aldeburgh Festival from 7 - 9th November, reading from Wall, doing a blind criticism session with Matt Harvey and participating in a slam in the Cabaret!

More details from the Festival web site or e-mail: .

---

Full list of Smokestack publications.

 

Buying Smokestack Books

Order Smokestack books from Inpress.

Trade orders from:
Central Books,
99 Wallis Road,
London E9 5LN
Telephone: 0845 4589911

To order direct from Smokestack Books (please add 50p postage & packing), or for further information, contact:
PO Box 408,
Middlesbrough TS5 6WA
Telephone: 01642 813997

Smokestack Books is partnered with Inpress
Smokestack Books is supported by the Arts Council of England (North East) and Middlesbrough Borough Council.

 

Website designed and maintained by Cornwell Internet
Last update: 5th September 2008.