Books published by Mica Press

Aura Christi is a romantic in classic disguise, reminding one of Hölderlin, Rilke or Emily Dickinson, with a unique approach, at the same time mythical and mystical, to the eternal themes of poetry, giving precedence to the individual’s inner and outer exile. While the metonymic postmodern fad is of no interest to her, she favors the hymnal and the solar with tragic twists, with divine praise and self-dissolution clashing, in a language purified of every redundancy, but not lacking in allusive complexity.      In The God’s Orbit, her most successful collection of poetry, Christi strikes the reader by her seraphic serenity, inspired, as she confesses, by Fra Angelico’s mural paintings; hers is the attitude of someone who, after crossing a Dantean bolgia, (a hell's ditch), after vanquishing the monsters of the Inferno, has left the drama of lucidity behind and reached a point in which reality, though still uncontrollable, has no more obscure niches. In naturally flowing lines, full of a sober inner musicality, that support a painful and clear vision of life, the often inimical gods slowly turn into God, the all-pacifying. The book is like a shout to the sky and divinity, forceful, convincing, defying today’s society and pointing to where salvation might come from.

The poems in Long Distance combine ideas of the sense of distance which exists between past and present, between separate lives in geographically separate places, and between people in relationships. People may live in different places but be linked together or live in the same place and be parted by their feelings or their experience. The main settings are a London suburb and contemporary Greece, but also include the New Forest and Anglo-Saxon England. The section ‘Camberwell’ concentrates on the suburb, and a variety of ways in which connecting with the past can make such a place a home, by re-imagining people and events which exist as recoverable sub-strata. Other poems broaden these themes. A set of love poems, ‘Long Distance’, is placed in a real contemporary world, but one woven with threads of myth and their presence in personal relationships. ‘Bookland’, another group of poems, explores the continuing meaning created by events, objects or places. Finally, the complexity of the various themes is contrasted in ‘The Ordinary’ by simple everyday experiences. In our new condition of ‘social distancing’ these poems explore ways in which we are more connected than we might imagine, to the past, to the imagined present, and to other versions of life.

Kitchen, 12.07 a.m., is the second collection of poems by Julian Flanagan (1962-2018). Many first appeared in magazines such as The Spectator, Ambit, The Rialto, The Reader, Envoi, Iota, and The Manchester Review. His poems have been short-listed in the Teignmouth Festival and Plough Poetry Prizes.Mario Petrucci described Flanagan's first collection as "Flecked with arresting imagery, Cooking with Cancer looks and looks again…it refuses to flinch."His poems can be celebratory, elegiac, or pithy - Apart We tap text, puncture separation with a line of drill heads: xxxxxPreacher-haunted motorways lie beside sleeping queen bees waiting to govern; a baby struggles through her first breaths; the Tardis jumps a middle-aged man back to his Cheshire childhood; a lawnmower cuts the air in a Jamaican stairwell; a boiler ticks reassuringly through the small hours.

The sensuous imagery and courageous protest are at the service of a moral mind. In this new collection, the poet's concerns have been altered by 'that other one / who may turn out lover or scorching sun'. But a romantic meeting is not the book's entire theme. True, 'the body's / sinuous trail of / rising desire' runs through the book, with its garden in the city, like water. The poet asks what will be left of all this experience, in the end? Seeking to answer that she imagines migrant refugees in the Mediterranean and villagers after a tsunami, memorialises her father in his life crossing the river into which she is scattering his ashes, narrates the lifelong actions of a simple villager drawing water from a well, visits the caves of Buddhas or gods; and although 'There are places that will / Never be known to us / The deepest recesses / That we'll refuse to enter', although a lover may betray and the flowers of the garden are scattered, the poet attempts to - perhaps does - find deliverance in kindness, the end of illusion, and the recovery of love in song. Leslie Bell, Mica Press.

Supplication, lament, invitation, warning; invocation, danger, devotion. You cannot consider these poems anything but true, but to what world do they correspond? With flames and shadows, birds and stars, for days of rage and of wonder, Vaughan Pilikian takes us on a series of risky, exalting journeys to the end of lyric. Read and live them.

This is the first collection of her own poems by the noted translator Angela Livingstone.The subjects are, in her own words: poetry, language, people, death, places, nature and things. The publisher thinks there are two more - faith and love.

Poems of the Essex saltmarshes, of the creeks, the fleets, the seascapes and the skies, in which science and imagination vie to measure up to the experience of nature. Mervyn Linford hymns and chronicles the birds, fish, and flora of his solitary seeing with loving attention to the colours and forms of the estuaries in all weathers - and he recalls visits to the cinema, the great cathedral of Chartres, and the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme.

The Death of Galahad is one long poem. In it the Arthurian hero Galahad is a compromised contemporary of European man who is voyaging through Hell. His heroines, his army, his critics and his antagonists also inhabit the poem, in which the sordid and the sacred meet, the anxieties and conflicts of a failed modernity and a future ideal undergo furious trial, and the mind of a young man battles for new vision through ordeals and temptations, seeking a marriage of light and hope.

Robert Wells was born in Oxford in 1947. He has worked as a woodman, a teacher and in publishing. His Collected Poems and Translations (Carcanet Press) appeared in 2009.';...quietly determined and original...for more than 30 years he has pursued the question of landscape, how it might be lived in and worked in, recorded and celebrated.'- Charles Bainbridge, The Guardian.';Wells inherits a faith in a poem as a thing in itself, that has value in a real world as well as an idyllic one'- Tom Payne, Times Literary Supplement.This pamphlet contains fifteen new poems. From the coins of Greek antiquity to a group of young folk with a laptop via the Mediterranean and Exmoor, the poet gives us objects, lives and places of interest: occasions of insight into the partly chosen, partly given, worlds of his and others' energetic existences. The poems in A Last Look are artefacts made with loving exactitude in the personal workshop of memory.

Cooking with Cancer is poetry served up in the form of a menu: Starters, Main Course, Afters, Digestif.This poetic chronicle, spiked with humour, leads the reader through an unpredictable odyssey as cancer interrupts life and life interrupts cancer, as loyalty and belief are tested, and as the author is ambushed by the idiosyncrasies and changing ages of love.