Books published by Knives Forks and Spoons

"There's a jolting frankness to these poems. Sometimes oddly bare and powerful, they say what they mean." - Mark Waldron "Penny Sharman's poems have a painter's touch, not just in terms of colour, form and light as invocation but in the care with which she picks words and feels her way through them to offer magical experiences that feel fresh and precise." - George Szirtes "Penny Sharman believes in beauty. She believes in a world where "cabbage white flies low / over the singing river," "Dragon lines at Culbone," and a world where "we are canopy adrift, clouds of happy happy-happy." She's a poet who believes there's a "green door / oasis in a burnt out mind" of this century, this crisis where we all find ourselves. So, perhaps it is a blessing that there are still people like Penny Sharman, telling us that "magical plant / mistletoe / needs a / kiss" - maybe if more people thought that way, our world would be kinder. - Ilya Kaminsky"Penny Sharman writes with passion and intensity, painting the world in luminous colours. For her, the meaning is somewhere within the microcosms that make up this universe - the snowflake, the insect, the hair standing up on your skin. In many of her poems she celebrates the unexpectedpleasures of the ageing body, suggesting that the years bring, not exactly wisdom, but a shamelesscuriosity that knows it can never be fully satisfied." - Ailsa Cox

In The Geometric Kingdom Rupert Loydell and Maria Stadnicka write about loss, grief and mourning and explore how memory, faith and ritual facilitate ongoing relationships between the living and the dead. 'Loydell is mining themes that resonate with our times, leading to collaborations with a talented array of fellow poets, allowing for a synergistic pulse of varied views. He and his fellow travelers ask difficult questions and offer open-ended answers through the time-tested holy triad of ethos, logos, and pathos.' - Joey Madia, X-Peri'Stadnicka's poetics is one of craftmanship, wherein she carefully walks the tightrope of surreal poetic metaphor and the gritty realism of investigative journalism and broadcasting. Drawing on her experiences in both, Stadnicka's writing culminates into a distinctly inventive literary landscape.' - Bryony Hughes, Stride

If Roy Fisher famously said 'Birmingham's what I think with', Cliff Yates would probably say 'Birmingham's who I eat with'. These lucid and nimble poems effortlessly thread in and out of the quotidian, always alert to the transformative power of the everyday seen clearly. History is here too, but faced lightly, alongside tributes to key influences like Fisher, O'Hara, Raworth, Sheppard. Yates's art is a fully embodied one (look out for the hilarious Tai Chi Sprout Stalk Form!) which moves - exuding a wry, wise vitality entirely his own.- Scott Thurston

Kianush collected and published his poems for children and young adults in eight books, all of which won different awards. He became known as the founder of children's poetry in Iran. But he does not care for this title which he believes to be quite contrary to his real achievement as the messenger of the truth hidden in the heart of perceptible realities which, in occasional blessed moments, reveals itself to him on the horizon of artistic beauty. He says that in Iran, a country where the people, especially the intelligentsia, have since the late nineteenth century been possessed by the politics of freedom and social change, the popularity of a poet depends on his being the artistic mouthpiece and interpreter of the political aspirations of the populace. On the other hand a poet like himself, one of the few poets who have not sacrificed the universal principles of the art of poetry for the pleasure of temporal popularity, is considered difficult, obscure, elitist, philosophical, idealist, and so forth.Poetry for Mahmud Kianush is the language of the childhood of historical man. He believes that the first human beings began to understand themselves, the world around them and the mysteries of the universe by their poetical interpretations of everything they saw and felt, and this is what real poets have always done and will always do. He agrees with the ancient idea that "man is a political animal," but he adds that man must remain faithful to his primordial nature and first be a poet. 

"What a drag it is getting old" was one of the few things that Belmont Thom and his wife Tuppence agreed on. With a nod to Sophocles and to Homer and with a great big genuflecting thanks-for-the-idea to the late Peter Tinniswood (who appears in the piece) Stroll On tells this couple's story. The narrative is a hybrid of two kinds: 'poem-prose' (as opposed to a prose poem) and magic-realism. 'By turns funny, brilliant, sharp, savage, and surprising, this novella in poem-prose is compulsively readable and intellectually sustaining, as well as being a terrific feat of imagination and linguistic legerdemain. In Stroll On James Russell has invented the perfect form for his good-humouredly caustic outlook on things. All human life is there. Even Alma Cogan'. - Ian Patterson'I devoured Stroll On with relish (and a side order of quadrupley-fried sweet potatoes). It's very clever and very funny (Neither/Do orgasms last long but they remain popular). Everyone who's worth it should read it'. - Andy Mayer'All this and his eye for telling details make James Russell a true story teller and a true poet'. - Lee Harwood

An ethnographic bricolage of fragmentary narratives and lost voices from a future tribal culture of survivors following the Second Great Flood, Remnants provides glimpses into the myths, rituals, songs, customs, lifestyles, dream visions and the intertwining personal stories of a post-apocalyptic community existing in the ruined shadows of our own civilisation. Jane Burn and Bob Beagrie weave an unsettling tapestry of possible subjectivities navigating the margins between endurance and extinction in the not too distant future. The collection considers what has been and might yet be. What scraps we remember, what has formed and shaped the poets' memories and minds. Through recalling forgotten dialects and language, Bob and Jane dip in and out of history, religion and ancient myths and rebuild themselves again.

These collaborative sequences were written during the winter months 2015-18. The poets' journeys took them from Hove via Paris to Istanbul, on to Baghdad then across the Steppes and along the Silk Road. They nearly reached the North Pole before landing on the Moon. Returning to England they recorded its savage devastation. Our bedraggled pair were rescued only by discovering in their battered rucksacks a formal austerity as regular and elliptical as the world itself, selflessly announced to the innocent reader with each desperate but conclusive breath.Previous Halsey/Corcoran collaborations include Your Thinking Tracts or Nations (West House 2001) and A Horse That Runs: To & Fro with Wallace Stevens (Constitutional Information 2015).