Tag: Shoestring Press

SPHINX HIGH STRIPE AWARD ANNOUNCED

The much coveted Sphinx High Stripe Award is announced annually. At least it will be. This is the inaugural announcement.

The much coveted Sphinx High Stripe Award is announced annually. This is the inaugural announcement.

All poetry pamphlets submitted (in triplicate) for review in the Sphinx area of this website receive three written responses from reviewers. Each reviewer is also asked to give a stripe rating based on 4 criteria, as follows:

  • Production quality (paper, covers, ‘feel’ and design of publication)
  • Quality of the poetry.
  • Coherence/ character/ identity (whatever!) of collection as a whole. It could have coherence in terms of deliberate fragmentation, if that was a consistent central idea.
  • Warmth of recommendation to other readers.

The three reviews are then edited into one document, with the amalgamated stripe rating published on the website in the form of a Sphinx logo bearing the appropriate number of stripes. Any publication which gets 7 or over has had a warm response.

Since this is the inaugural High Stripe Announcement, the selection has been based on all pamphlets reviewed since the system was introduced. In that time, only three pamphlets have received nine-stripe awards and therefore they are the winners in this unfunded and under-publicised competition.

They are . . . (drum roll). . .

The Announced, Ruth Valentine, Ellipsis 1/ Sylph Editions 2009 (sold out and therefore now a collector’s item)

No Panic Here, Mark Halliday, HappenStance 2009

Shadow, Alison Brackenbury, HappenStance, 2009

The careful reader will note that all three were published in 2009. No nine-stripers in 2010, then? Not yet. We are still in the process of reviewing last year’s publications. However, the following were close contenders with 8.5 stripes also in 2008/9:

Emblems, Wayne Burrows, Shoestring Press, 2009

Hem and Heid, James Robertson, Kettillonia, 2009

Amicable Numbers, Mike Barlow, Templar Poetry, 2008

Party Piece, Anna Woodford, Smith/Doorstop Books, 2009

Treasure Ground, Clare Best, HappenStance, 2009

I hope it doesn’t look like corruption in the ranks that two of the nine-stripers are HappenStance publications. One of these two, Mark Halliday’s No Panic Here, received a fairly swingeing review in issue 1 of New Walk, so it would suggest that readers either love or loathe the publication (but at least that’s interesting). I’m also alarmed to find I have managed never to notice we reviewed Anna Woodford’s Party Piece twice, so that was six readers as well as further proof that I’m losing my marbles, if I ever had any. I have no idea how that happened, although I do know I was one copy short at one point and bought another, which suggests I had five (but not six). Duh. Lovely wee pamphlet, anyway.

Congratulations to Ruth, Mark and Alison, winners. Congratulations to Mike, James, Wayne, Clare and Anna, close contenders. I may yet have some Sphinx t-shirts printed so that winners will be able to remark at poetry gatherings and festivals — ‘Been there, got the t-shirt’. If I were rich, I would send you all a sack of money.

At the moment I will put the Sphinx high-striper accolade at the top of all reviews of publications receiving 8.5 or above, so if poets or publishers want to link from their website to that page, it might boost morale and hopefully attract readers.

(thanks to Ross Kightly, who helped check the stripes).

 

THE PLOT HAS LANDED

Plot and Counterplot, my own second collection, is in the HappenStance shop. You can buy it from here via PayPal, or by post, or go to the Shoestring Press website and purchase using their downloadable form. One of the poems inside is also available as a PoemCard.

Plot and Counterplot, my own second collection, is in the HappenStance shop. You can buy it from here via PayPal, or by post, or go to the Shoestring Press website and purchase using their downloadable form. One of the poems inside is also available as a PoemCard.

The launch of this Shoestring Press volume is at the Scottish Poetry Library on Saturday 20th November, 3.00 for 3.30. John Lucas, Shoestring Publisher, will be there, and he’ll also be doing the Scottish launch of two books of his own, both published by Five Leaves.

If you’re in Edinburgh, do come. Not only will Ross Bradshaw (Five Leaves Publisher) be there in person, but it’s not all poetry. One of John’s books is Next Year Will Be Better, A Memoir of Life in the Fifties. So if you’re old enough to remember life back then, or even if you’re not . . .

 

 

 

 

Merriness in Midhurst

This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!

This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!

This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!

It doesn’t rain in Midhurst apparently. Not like here. So we had a very nice time visiting beautiful gardens and I took our photograph on automatic through the teapots.

 

Moving Life with Teapot

 

There was serious work going on too though. For some time, a pamphlet has been in hand called Night Brings Home the Crowes. Written by my mother (Kathleen Curry), it tells as much of the story as we can recover (from her memories and a few other sources) of the Crowe family — that’s my mother’s grandmother and her nine siblings. It will mainly be of interest to family, but there is some lovely period detail that others will also enjoy, I think.

Anyway, one of our tasks this week was careful proof-reading, page by page, and collecting a few more photographs to go in. The publication, with luck, will be finished and go to the printer this week.

And yet another publication under scrutiny this weekend has been my own next collection, which John Lucas of Shoestring Press is publishing. It’s due some time in the autumn – perhaps October – and although I got it together, more or less, a good few months ago (in fact, last summer, I think), I put off finalising it until the ultimatum came.

Which it did, while I was dipping in and out of A Field of Large Desires, an anthology of Greville Press poems, brought out just a few months ago by Carcanet (I thoroughly recommend it — the contents are different from anything you will find elsewhere). Astbury’s Greville Press is, of course, chiefly and justifiably renowned for poetry pamphlets. In the preface to this book-length volume, Grey Gowrie says,

Poems are best read [ . . . ] with but few of their fellows. The great collections of great poets are useful for reference but hell to read. A slim vol is okay; a pamphlet best of all.

Increasingly, I agree. My Shoestring Press book will be a slim volume, but even at that, it’s weighing down the world with more poetry. I hope Plot and Counterplot justifies its place. We’ll see. When your main task has come to be publishing other people’s work, you end up feeling bizarrely guilty writing poems yourself. Like counselling people to smoke less, while cultivating your own cigar habit on the side.

Anyway, this week I’ll also be working on the Thomas Hardy pamphlet, amongst other things. Thankfully, the submission period is now over, so letters to poets are off the agenda, unless they’re poets in progress, as it were. I’ve been amused to find that several people have congratulated me for publishing Selima Hill’s winning pamphlet, which of course I did not. I haven’t even seen it: it hasn’t come in to Sphinx for review. Speaking of which, there are a couple of reviews nearly ready to go up too. Another task for today.

I’ll conclude with a bit of James Reeves (another under-rated poet) from the Greville Press Anthology. It’s titled ‘The Prisoners’, and every second line should be indented, but I can’t make WordPress do that for me (if anyone reading this knows how, please tell me):

Somehow we never escaped
Into the sunlight,
Though the gates were always unbarred
And the warders tight.
For the sketches on the walls
Were to our liking,
And squeaks from the torture-cell
Most satisfying.