Books published by High Window

"This collection is valuable for its steady faithfulness to the original, its breadth of poems, and in particular for so many of the pre-revolutionary poems." Emily Lygo, Modern Poetry in Translation 2009

A welcome full first collection from Alison Mace. Poems about family relationships, and by implication love and loss, are delicately and minutely observed and felt. She writes fearlessly on ageing and death, but these are not mournful poems - rather they are truthful and moving. Mace is skilled in sustained verse form and also subtle in her use of it, as, for example, rhymes and half-rhymes which make their impact within lines as surely as they do when they appear as line endings. Included is a long novelistic sequence set in New England - an absorbing tour de force commemorating the long life of her American aunt. Joy Howard, Editor, Grey Hen Press

'Alice Allen spent her formative years in Jersey, and her poems are imbued with its landscape, language and people. The particular focus of Daylight of Seagulls is the occupation of the island during WWII and the bravery of its citizens in the face of invasion. But Allen's poems offer more than a history retold - they are compassionate, lyrical, inventive, often taking on voices of ordinary men and women who've remained unheard. She unearths the island's secrets and sets them in front of us - treasures from a bygone world. This is a beautiful debut from a poet who understands how to evoke the potency of place.' Tamar Yoseloff 'Like the granite of the islands, this collection glitters with facets, sharp-edged glints of many lives. Good writing of place is also about time; addressing a difficult history, these poems show how the past, especially the unspoken, lives in the present tense.' Philip Gross

'James W. Wood is a talent to be reckoned with: both lyrical and humane, he has a technical ability with language that shines through every poem. Jane McKie, founding editor, Knucker Press James W Wood cares about the precision and possibilities of language and about honesty when dissecting the subtleties of human emotion, neither one to the exclusion of the other. His work is a pleasure to read and, when questioning or provocative, none the less pleasurable for that. -

True poetry has the intellectual and formal rigour to tell us stories of the way we live. In Tim O?Leary?s Manganese Tears, there are wonderful elegies for the village community og the poet?s childhood, and most powerfully the slow dying of his mother whose ?life has moved downstairs / with the vase of shrivelling daffodils? and the limited horizons where ?Each kiss is a kiss goodbye?. The grieving is genuine, but what makes it especially moving is the intellectual honesty, for the poet his mother?s ?thankyous? meaning ?as much as / amens muttered during mass? / religiously bare?. Even for friends in the village, refusing o admit they were ever ill ?the steel is in their gazes, / and the gaze at the abyss?. Love is what holds personal and communal life together, as the chemical element Manganese holds together the health of both body and brain. But with tears. William Bedford

Margaret Wilmot writes like a true citizen of the world. She is as at home in the nine-partsequence: Quanta US: ?Wide-screen America?/ prelude to a Western,? as in a sailor?s hostelin Buenos Aires: (Your Holiness, Your Grace, Dear Sir, Dear Pope). She writes with agleaming, persistent sense of wonder. Small, yet vital details are spotted, pondered andbrought into the spotlight of her keen gaze, becoming poignant, whimsical and deeplysignificant in turn. Horse riding in Santa Catalina (Santa Catalina), she is halted by amigration of frogs: ?Each step will be a killing?, and who knew that the bullying magpie canrecognise itself in mirrors? Just like humans! (The Thriving Magpie) This collectionbreathes with her dazzling use of language, and what I can only define as a sort of heightenedenergy underpinned by an indefinable sense of spirituality. It is a unique and welcomeaddition to a sometimes rather tired contemporary poetry scene.

Michael Lesher's Surfaces is a celebration of what might be called the central paradox of poetry: that every attempt to plumb the depths of lived experience must begin, and end, in the impenetrable surface world of words printed on paper. Somehow, the shape of a collection of letters placed on a page, and the sounds they produce when pronounced, have to convey a sense of the most inward levels of experience. This would appear impossible, and the collection's introductory quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson -- "Give me truths;/for I am weary of the surfaces,/and die of inanition" -- only underscores the difficulty. Yet the goal of these poems is precisely to find those "truths" not by fleeing the surface of poetry -- line, rhythm, diction, and so on -- but by embracing it. And in doing so, of course, to reveal beauty as well.

'In ?West South North, North South East?, Daniel Bennett envisages landscapes of decay; urban Britain as a ruined, post-apocalyptic wasteland, haunted by its past, at odds with its present, fearful of its future; countryside and coast bound loosely together by mud and mildew. A hauntingly compelling collection from a distinctive and thought-provoking new voice.? ?In ?West South North, North South East?, Daniel Bennett envisages landscapes of decay; urban Britain as a ruined, post-apocalyptic wasteland, haunted by its past, at odds with its present, fearful of its future; countryside and coast bound loosely together by mud and mildew. A hauntingly compelling collection from a distinctive and thought-provoking new voice.?