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"Ah-oh, smokestack lightning
Shinin', just like gold
Why don't ya hear me cryin'?"
Howling Wolf
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.
"In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times."
Bertolt Brecht
Smokestack believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society.
"and on every side
smokestacks were dancing on rooftops."
Vladimir Mayakovsky
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
"I want a form that's large enough to swim in," wrote W.H. Auden in Letter to Lord Byron - "And talk on any subject that I choose,..." He was writing in 1936 to the ghost of the long-dead Byron, to tell him about recent developments in poetry and politics. Seventy years later, N. S. Thompson decided it was time somebody wrote to Auden in order to bring him up to speed with events since his death in 1973.
Letter to Auden is an anti-heroic verse-epistle, combining Byron's savage wit and Auden's breezy conversational manner. It's an irreverent and original venture into the world of the Audenesque, and a homage to one of the twentieth-century's greatest poets.
More about N.S. Thompson's Letter to Auden.
"I've never seen another book like it. It's poetry, it's a thesis about history, it's a roll-call of revolutionary martyrs during two or three millennia, it includes many jokes, it's an intimate confession - not of an individual penitent, but of the wounded body of a set of political beliefs, it's a prayer book of hopes, and, finally, it's a chapbook, like those once sold by pedlars. As soon as it's in your hands, you recognize it. It's a book that innumerable people have been waiting to read. It'll be passed, I think, from hand to hand."
John Berger
More about Common Cause by Francis Combes
Kristin Dimitrova is a Balkan minimalist, a feminist-fabulist whose work combines the fantastic and the prosaic. She writes with a deceptively simple, playful, light touch, teasing the reader with faux folk-wisdom and unexpected, often bathetic endings.
My Life in Squares is an introduction to the work of a major European poet and one of the most original writers to emerge in recent years from the 'new Europe'.
More about Kristin Dimitrova's My Life in Squares
The Jewish-Hungarian poet András Mezei survived the Holocaust as well as the three-month siege of Budapest. His life was inevitably shaped by these events. Throughout his long writing career, he returned repeatedly to the terrible experiences of his childhood, assembling a poetic collage of eye-witness accounts of racist mass murder. Christmas in Auschwitz brings together, for the first time in English, all of Mezei's most important poems about the Hungarian Holocaust.
More about Christmas in Auschwitz by András Mezei
Full list of Smokestack publications.
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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; supported by the Arts Council of England (North East) Lottery Grants for the Arts and Middlesbrough Borough Council.
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Last update: 20th August 2010.
