Smokestack Books

Two New Poetry Titles from Smokestack, November 2011

THE LIMERICKIAD: VOLUME I: FROM GILGAMESH TO SHAKESPEARE

Martin Rowson

Every week for the last five years, the award–winning cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson has been re–writing the classics of World Literature in The Independent on Sunday as a series of limericks.

Now collected together for the first time, The Limerickiad: volume 1 takes us from the Sumerian classic Gilgamesh to the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

Combining bad jokes, dodgy rhymes and hilarious cartoons, The Limerickiad does for Literature what 1066 and All That did for History.

Martin Rowson is a multi award–winning cartoonist whose work appears regularly in The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, The Daily Mirror, The Morning Star, Tribune and many other publications. His books include graphic adaptations of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and a forthcoming updated version of Gulliver's Travels. Among his other books are Snatches, The Dog Allusion, Fuck and Stuff.

Hardback £9.99 ISBN 978-0-9568144-2-5

union: new and selected poems

Paul Summers

union brings together two decades' worth of Paul Summers' poems, drawing on books and pamphlets, performance pieces and collaborations, as well as a long and previously unpublished sequence about the North of England, 'broken land'. Summers is a poet of place and of travel, of exile and of home, combining the domestic and the epic, the personal and the political, the rhetorical and the confessional. He is a Blyth Spartans fan, a proud Northumbrian internationalist and a fervent celebrant of the idea of 'we' – of community, people and hope – of the notion of union itself.

Paul Summers was born in Blyth, Northumberland in 1967. He currently lives in Queensland, Australia. A founding editor of the magazines Billy Liar and Liar Republic, he has written extensively for TV, film, radio and the theatre. Previous books include Cunawabi, The Rat's Mirror, The Last Bus, Beer & Skittles, Vermeer's Dark Parlour, Big Bella's Dirty Cafe, Dreams Days Break Portfolio (with photographer David Gray) and Three Men on the Metro (with Andy Croft and Bill Herbert). He currently lives in Queensland, Australia.

Paperback £7.99 ISBN 978-0-9564175-9-6