Books published by Hedgehog Poetry Press

Back in 2017 as part of my MA in creative writing I was required to take up a writing residency. I chose my local Victorian park, Worth Park, in Crawley, West Sussex. As part of my remit, I researched the park's past going back to 19th September 1888 when Sir Francis Montefiore, the first and last Baronet of Worth Park, brought home his Austrian bride. This short fictional West Sussex tale is based on facts from archived newspaper cuttings, black and white historic photographs and filling in the gaps with fiction. Step back to 1888 and become part of the Victorian crowd waiting at Three Bridges Station.

In Vexed - Z D Dicks'' electrifying new collection, a series of unexpected protagonists face dramatic challenges (a Bodhisattva learns to let go, Diogenes looks at a cynical world, Achilles hears his dead lover), and the human condition, with all it''s trials and tribulations, longings and aversions, fears and excitements are explored in a series of richly lyrical and vividly imagined poems.Dicks takes the reader into fantastical, yet convincing worlds to explore our darkest secrets and inner conflicts - in Black Tooth Fish there is the sometimes tortuous nature of desire, death is examined in Blossom, in Buffet a disaster benefits those who aren''t the victims, in Doppelg├ñnger - the protagonist comes to terms with the painful experience of being ghosted, Owl Rising - is an exuberant giving into to the lack of control we experience in life and The Loaded Gun details a quasi-sexual attitude to violence.This is an unflinching and clearsighted collection, in which our most intimate concerns are explored and addressed head on, in charged, beautifully wrought and fiercely original poems.These are poems which address the perhaps irresolvable conflicts, questions and dilemmas in our life - this is a book for anyone who has ever felt vexed.''In Vexed, Z D Dicks pulls titan, shaman, alchemist and fantastic beast into a realm where the natural and manufactured coalesce. Our guide through this landscape of petrol rainbows, metal tongues and acid storms is a poet enraptured and enlightened by the beauty and awe of the unusual and terrific. His strict eye always on his deft organic verse; Germanic, alliterative and mythological, but always placed in the painful present''.     -R M Francis   ''The poems in Zack Dicks''s Vexed are not ones you would want to curl up and get cosy with. The language is visceral and sometimes startling, the images precise and unexpected. In ''Doppelg├ñnger'', his ''double rides a hog    roars through streets / chugs and judders    with goggled fly eyes''; and I suspect this is how to experience Vexed. Don''t examine each line or image, buckle up and enjoy the ride.'' -Angela France  ''Vexed introduces an exciting new poetic voice. In language which crackles and fizzes, the collection offers us a range of subjects, drawing on everything from Brexit-era Britain to Classical myth. I''m particularly taken with explorations of the natural world in this collection: in poems like ''Falcon Drive'' and ''Black Tooth Fish,'' the poet proves himself adept at fashioning a language which thrillingly gives us the world of beasts. Powerful and distinctive, Vexed announces a writer to watch.'' -Jonathan Edwards ''These poems bring to mind every apocalyptic painting I have ever seen. In dark reds and golds they are bone black-box theatres all painted with muscular language. Here, we see Diogenes the beggar, pull a half-eaten sandwich from a city bin and a man stripped down to his bones being eyed by dogs. Tread carefully in this vexed and shaken world when one trip on the platform could send you plummeting to hell''s fiery tarpits'' -Helen Ivory

"Liar Liar" is a much-needed response to the myriad of dangers we all face in an increasingly challenging Covid world, and examines the disturbing lack of coherent response to that challenge from our constitutional governments and how the people of the UK and USA in particular have suffered, often times paying with their lives. Brian McManus paints compelling lyrical word pictures of the distressing tales of ordinary, everyday people who find their lives torn asunder, and the dearth of both intellect and ability amongst our political leadership for managing and directing a meaningful response to such an all-encompassing pandemic.If you haven''t read a book of poetry for a while you need to pick this one up - today.

With Songs to Learn & Sing we wanted to try something a little different. We challenged poets to choose their favourite song (or a favourite song, nobody has just one, after all) and from there they should shamelessly steal the title and then write a poem that responds to it. This response could be based on how the song makes them feel, a memory of where they heard it first or whatever it was that made it important in the first place.This proved to be very popular and choosing Twenty from among them was all but impossible. But choose them you must and we were pleased to select Ceinwen Haydon’s I Want To Hold Your Hand as the winner of our competition as it summed-up exactly what it was all about in the first place, although Ali Jones and Mick Yates, our Highly Commended Runners-Up, both could have taken the metaphorical Gold Disc on another day.Songs to Learn & Sing is something a little different and we are sure that it will soon become a classic.

From the sonnet, ''Tournesols'' to ''Boutique Hotel,'' any joy and relief in this collection of poems are short-lived, reflecting their creator''s real-life experiences and those of others she knows well. We are born, we bloom for a while, if lucky, but like the wondrous evening primrose, emblem of her childhood on the sand dunes near Porthcawl, soon wrinkle and close. And all along the way lies hidden danger. From whoever is lying in wait for us to trip and fall, to the very air we breathe. Whoever is pressing the right buttons to create the kind of world only seen in futuristic films. Beneath and beyond the temporal, visible beauty of this planet and those we love, lurk our worst imaginings, while easily peddled words of comfort and hope soon weaken and disintegrate. And then there''s the never-ending guilt. William Butler Yeats was right.                       ''Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?''

These poems are a selection from the poems written one a day day during lockdown and as we eased out. They are a diary of the poet''s inner journey; a record of the range of emotions and thoughts during those months of isolation that we can all recognise but might find hard to articulate. They run the gamut of frustration, fear, sadness, loneliness and resignation, but also the joy of being part of the natural world and the freedom to do nothing. They are shot through with hope and optimism.

Partnerships are demanding. Reconciling two sets of expectations, hopes, ambitions, desires and demands is an exacting business. The ideal is surely a mutually agreed balance between give and take, rights and compromises, constraints and freedoms. Any intrusion into a partnership is capable of challenging it, rocking it, even destroying it ... but mutual recognition of a greater good can seal and cement a relationship. With mutual well-being as an agreed aim, supported by good humour, grace and forgiveness, individuals might grow the kind of partnership that becomes something more than both of them, something greater than they might have imagined. 

Vertigo to Go is a timely and searing examination of the current state of the world, seen through the eyes of a young protagonist dealing with grief, addiction, loneliness and madness in the face of invasive technologies, vast systemic inequalities and environmental crisis. Vertigo to Go is a lyrical hymn to the power of poetry to sublimate pain and fear into art that is unafraid to confront the problems of the world.

There is a house in a forest, where something strange is happening. The birds are quiet, the animals avoid it and it is only spoken of by children in awed whispers, in torchlight around campfires.Featuring Twenty poems from Twenty poets, this spooky collection of poetry is one that is destined to be dusted off every Halloween.Includes new work from:∩╗┐∩╗┐Mick YatesOz HardwickCeinwen E. Cariad HaydonElisabeth KellySue IbrahimNaomi SterlingAndrew SticklandAndy EycottBrian McManusPhil SantusSusan DarlingtonMargaret RoyallMerril D. SmithPatricia M. OsborneAmina AlyalDarren J BeaneyKathryn AldermanKate YoungRosie BarrettPhilippa Hatton-Lepine 

"Katie Proctor''s Seasons is a collection of temporal elegant epiphanies well suited to a pandemic plagued culture. In Firsts," Proctor writes of the knowledge that shadows such experiences- ''knowing nothing will ever be quite like this again.'' She speaks of distanced lovers imagining touching flesh and pressing flowers of the other''s hometown into a book. The tactile details of this collection are timely in their taunts of the ''melted endlessness.'' Proctor describes in ''An Empty Infinity.'' It is both a precise description of the condition we are experiencing in the Covid era as well as a reminder that this is but another uncomfortable season that will eventually succumb to another." Kristin Garth, author of Puritan U Succubus Alumnus, Hedgehog Poetry, and Flutter: Southern Gothic Fever Dream, TwistiT Press

''Psychopathogen'' explores the effect of exceptional times on unexceptional people: a reluctant schoolboy; a shielded grandmother; a middle-aged married couple; a pair of home-working parents and their children. This is not life as we know it. Nigel Kent''s sometimes witty and always moving poems show us how life under Lockdown has been transformational, changing our routines, our relationships, our values and our perspective on the world. Underpinning them all is a profound sense of loss: life will never be the same again.