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The Fenland Poetry Journal (FPJ)
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STANDING ROOM ONLY
The two Jims attracted a magnificent crowd for the launch of their new pamphlets on Saturday afternoon. 
Both are accomplished readers and they did not disappoint. In fact, they were at their magnificent best. Highlights were Jim Carruth on the Scottish Independence vote, hilariously packaged in a poem about ice-cream; and Jim C Wilson taking Stevenson’s Mr Hyde in his stride via Adelaide Crapsey on an unerring route to Minsk which, as he pointed out, has not only a precise geography but a precise enunciation, without which it can turn to ‘mince’.
The audience was marvellously attentive, and the business of managing wine tasting in three sections between the poems made it a reading with zing. Ross Kightly, author of Gnome Balcony, became the blurb from Matthew Stewart’s wine poems. I was the wine.
The wine itself was also there in liquid form and merrily imbibed. Ross’s wife Chris joined the elves (the quiet but essential support staff (these included my daughter Gillian and her husband Jamie) circulating with wine tastings, pouring drinks downstairs, and later selling the books.
It was lovely to have several other HappenStance poets there too. Gerry Cambridge was on the stairs, Eleanor Livingstone, Alan Hill and Deborah Trayhurn sitting down. Jenny Elliott (whose mysterious Shed Press pamphlet Preparing to be Beautiful snuck into the recent subscriber mailshot) was there too. Patricia Ace standing at the back, Margaret Christie sitting near the front. Gill Andrews and Theresa Munoz came in a little later. Who says poetry is not a welcoming world?
Meanwhile, the Scottish Poetry Library was as life-enhancing as always, light streaming through the upstairs windows. There were people sitting on chairs listening, standing at the back, on the stairs – a couple even sitting downstairs for the sound to fall from above like snow. The angelic SPL staff were at the desk calm, reassuring and supportive. The ancient poets nodded quietly from their places between the pages on the library stacks.
This is a place in which magical things happen – and yesterday they did.
THE TWO JIMS, AND HAVING A SAY
There is Jim C, and then there is Jim . . . C.
I should have known it was a mistake to release two publications by poets with the same first name. Both Scottish. Both charming gentlemen, whom I would not wish, in any way, to offend.
However, Jim Carruth (author of Rider at the Crossing), when abbreviated becomes Jim C. And Jim Wilson (author of Will I Ever Get to Minsk?) is also . . . er . . . Jim C Wilson, and therefore I often save files of his as Jim C.
So more than once, I have sent communications about Jim C to Jim C. I mean, Jim C Wilson to Jim Carruth. And to add insult to injury, I have kept referring to Jim Carruth’s pamphlet, Rider at the Crossing as Rider at the Crossroads.
The Two Jims will have a Christmas launch at the Scottish Poetry Library on December 15th (a Saturday afternoon), and there will be several Zaleo wines and some interesting sort of tasting going on. What are the chances that I will introduce the Crossing as Crossroads, and Jim W as Jim C?
I think I ought to say that although the two Jims are Scottish and share a first name, their poems and their personalities are nothing like each other. They are men of distinction and character. Both can be funny, but in very different ways. One is West, one is East. One is Jim C and one is Jim W.
For Jim W, the collection represents many of his best poems from the last several years, and some of them recall other great personalities from Scottish poetry, people Jim met in person and remembers here: Norman MacCaig, for example. He is a rich source of anecdote and tradition, and he always has a little mischief up his capacious sleeve.
For Jim Carruth, often known for his settings in field and farm, there is not a farm in sight. But there is much else: fun, and sadness, and the feeling of a bit of a crossroads. I mean crossing. No, I do mean crossroads. You have the sense he is mid-career as a poet, looking back and forward, appraising the road already travelled, weighing up what’s on the horizon.
Paula Jennings will not be surprised at my getting things wrong. Her lovely and unusual collection, From the Body of the Green Girl, stuck in my mind as Out of the Body of the Green Girl, and as a result I kept putting that erroneous title into bits and pieces of things, including the official registration for the publication. I had to go back and register the correction. In fact, even a few moments ago, I typed them the wrong way round. But I think she has forgiven me.
I am in many ways a perfectionist, so these things are painful. How on earth did I manage to publish four poets whose first name was Martin? (If you have just sent me a submission and Martin is your name, it will not increase your chances of success.)
My level of confusion rises when exhaustion sets in, and exhaustion, like strawberry jam with additional pectin, has certainly set this week.
As I am all too fond of reminding people, it is not easy to sell poetry. Although that literary form is still somehow regarded as rare and beautiful, most possible purchasers are content to regard its beauty from a distance. So the business of negotiating, designing and printing a small pamphlet publication is the least of it. After that, there’s the flyer to design, the book to register, the online shop to populate, the poets’ bio pages to complete, the copies to post to the National Library, the Agency for the other copyright libraries, the Scottish Poetry Library, the London Poetry Library, the authors (some in packets, some in a large box), the queues in the post office, and so on. Later, it’s review copies and fulfilling the online orders, which start trickling in.
The poets themselves will shift some copies. This is good but it won’t be enough (or it rarely is). This is where the subscribers come in, the wonderful people who formally express an interest in HappenStance, in the form of a £7.50 payment. For this, they get (at the moment) an annual chapter in the story of the press. This year, the chapters vanished completely and one day these things will have a value, so if you have Chapter 6, hang onto it. They also get a pamphlet of their choice.
After that, they also get approximately two mailshots per year by post. By good old-fashioned, and now extremely expensive, stamps. The Christmas mailshot has just gone out and this year it even contained a free gift, a small and lovely little thing designed by Jenny Elliott and her secret and mischievous Shed Press. And there’s the Christmas card: 300 were handfolded last week and enveloped.
I have always been better at giving things away then making money. So it’s a particular point of pride to me to design attractive flyers for each publication, with a sample poem on the back, and these go in the mailshot too.
Of course, I hope some people will order some pamphlets as a result of all this, not least from the two Jims, and most subscribers do order at least two or three publications a year – the point at which the subscription scheme starts to cover its costs and put some cash back in the bank. And at least those who can’t afford to buy, or who don’t fancy the current bunch of poets, get the flyers and other bits and pieces.
Over the years, the subscriber list has grown steadily. Each person has a number and I am now up to 384, I think. In real terms there are just about 300 ‘live’ subscribers, several of which have become regular correspondents and friends. I’ve lost 80ish. When I say ‘live’, some of my subscribers really have died, to my particular grief. These have included, for example, Julia Casterton, Cliff Ashby, Tom Duddy and Bertie Lomas. Others simply drop the subscription, either because they don’t like most of the poetry I’m publishing (a wholly valid reason for dropping out) or because they only subscribed because they were sending in a submission of their own, and I have not come up trumps.
Most of the poets I have, in the end, published do continue to subscribe, and there are a lot of them now. I once calculated that if I had eventually published 500 poets (I am up to about 130), and if they all continued to support the press and purchased two pamphlets a year at full price, or 4 at half price, I could continue to fund six new pamphlet poets annually, and do all the other poetry stuff I do. Or almost. Now there’s a thought.
But it’s not just the business of buying things. Or selling things. It’s the issue of a proper readership. What I hope for in the HappenStance subscribers is people who actually read the poems—and preferably tell me what they think of them. Because the current list of publications reflects something in the story of literature. This list is current and contemporary. This is some of whatever poets are doing right now, at this minute, in the UK. And at some point, folk will look back on it and maybe say, ‘Now that was quite interesting.’ Or ‘Now that was bollocks’, or ‘How on earth did they underestimate that one?’
When I was at school, and even at university, I read dead poets. Nothing against dead poets. I like dead poets. But when, back in the early 1970s, I picked up a copy of a contemporary magazine – like Poetry Review for example, which I had even heard of – I didn’t like most of it. It didn’t live up to whatever it was I expected from the rare and beautiful thing poetry was supposed to be. I didn’t know where to start to find the thing I would like or did want.
Even now, it’s difficult, isn’t it? I read a ton of poetry every year. We have to heave it away from the door in buckets. And lots of it is okay. Some is good. Hardly any is rare and beautiful. Even the best poets alive write little that’s rare and beautiful.
People sometimes ask publishers why they started. In my case, there are many answers to that question. One of mine – and I don’t often admit it, because it feels risky – is that I wanted a say in what was going on. Someone always has a say in what gets to be Literature. But actually, anybody can have a say. It’s not as difficult as it’s cracked up to be.
Besides, it’s one of the best rides at the workaholics’ theme park.
HOW LONG SHOULD A POET LEAVE BETWEEN COLLECTIONS?
How long should a poet leave between collections? Will fifteen years do?
Martin Edwards’ HappenStance pamphlet Rainstorm with Goldfish is his second collection. His first – also a pamphlet (he was a Redbeck Press pamphlet competition winner) – was Coconut Heart in 1997.
So Edwards has had no fewer than fifteen years to mull the poems between the pages of Rainstorm with Goldfish. And I think it shows. Without meaning to lapse into blurbonic plague (see Dennis O’Driscoll in Dark Horse, issue 25), the language here is distilled. There’s a purity in the understatement that strikes me as rare, and beautiful.
Poetry’s a fickle business. It was back in 1984 that Martin first encountered a little blaze of glory. He had poems in a Faber anthology, Hard Lines, and before he knew it he was being interviewed on Radio 1 as one of the latest gifted young poets.
It’s 2012, so it doesn’t take a genius to work out he’s no longer young and the blaze of glory was short-lived. But he’s been a faithful servant to the Muse all this time. He doesn’t write lightly.
Here, for example, is ‘Grief’. It looks so easy.
Your eyes and nose and mouth
were points
in a pattern of stars, gone
in a blink.
All the palaces of your voice were empty;
all the labyrinths of your fingerprints.
Or there’s ‘Hate’, which begins:
I’m sixteen and just beginning
to hate myself.
How could anyone not want to read the rest?
Rainstorm with Goldfish outfaces brevity with depth. And although there is something valiantly restrained about working against the current, about resisting the imperative of publish publish publish, I hope it won’t be fifteen years before Edwards does more. Anna Adams, in Island Chapters, says “True poems come into being at the top of an experience chain, as people and birds of prey are at the top of a food chain”, “something found, not something sought”. Sometimes the necessary experience chain takes fifteen years. Or more.
It has been suggested – by Robert Nye, among others – that patience, for a poet, is a mandatory requirement. Waiting until the poem is ready. Again, I can feel myself toppling into numinosity (stop, woman, stop before it’s too late!) but there is something in this.
There are innumerable ways of writing poetry. Some are young and full of life and playfulness and sheer delight. Exhilarating and fast and intoxicating. But a few writers take a lifetime to say a handful of small things plainly. Rainstorm with Goldfish belongs in that group.
CUTTING LIGHT FROM DARKNESS
His handwriting is very hard to read.
His woodcuts, however, are a delight. I’m talking about Alan Dixon, who did the prints on the covers of the most recent pamphlet and its insert. I think he is a remarkable artist, and there’s an interview with him on the Sphinx website, in which, among other things, he says:
“Most of my printing is done in the garage with the door open. No passing neighbours have shown any interest. I have never used a press: I tread on the back of my blocks, even the smallest.”
Most of the HappenStance graphics are done by Gillian Rose, my daughter. However, the pamphlets for dead poets have all had Alan Dixon woodcuts on the covers: the Ruth Pitter publications, Thomas Hardy and contemporary Dorset poets, and now Jean Mackie. To me, there’s something both old and startlingly new about woodcuts. I love them, and I think Alan does marvellous work in this medium, right up there with the best of the expressionists.
When I ask him if he will do one for me, he reads the poems very carefully first—he is a poet himself as well as a practising artist. He has a sharp eye too, and invariably spots some proof-reading anomaly that I’ve missed.
Then he sends suggestions. I delight in the way they slither out of his envelopes on little slips of paper, usually with a piece of card to support them. Sometimes they’re on tissue paper. I imagine him chipping and scraping in his garage, the passing neighbours wholly impervious to what’s going on.
For the Jean Mackie publication, the poem that caught Alan’s interest was ‘The artifact’. That in itself was interesting because I don’t think it’s the poem that would first catch the eye of most readers. It’s a town and country poem, a bit of magic. Here it is:
Shaped like a plant it was,
With thirteen little knobs of light
On wires as thin as harebells.
At a touch it shivered into life,
Sliding against the thick, unwilling air
Till all the shopworn people smiled,
Not for the urban oddity
But because
Sweet as molasses
Here was a toy for four pounds fifty
Could emulate the lonely grasses.
He sent a print for this that we didn’t use. From a design point of view it was arresting. But the toy itself and the head of one of the onlookers seemed to merge. It’s at the top of this page, looking slightly blue because I’ve just photographed it on top of a sheet of blue paper.
Do you see the thirteen little knobs of light (cutting light from darkness) and the shopworn people, and a little perky child grinning up from the right hand side? There were two prints of this. He added an earring to the second, which is the one I have below. Where’s the earring? It’s on the ear of the person with his back to us, a slightly butch figure with his hair gelled upright (or startled into attention).
There was another possible print too. It was a much more rural scene and would have done nicely but Alan himself wasn’t satisfied. Charlie Allan, Jean’s son, liked the thought that the figure at the front, in silhouette, could have been Jean herself, who never liked her picture taken.
Jean’s pamphlet, A Little Piece of Earth, is unusual in that it has an insert. One of Jean’s poems (‘Granddaughter’) refers to “O, my loving innocent, my pretty dear,/ Who sit now eating cake/ Watching the ladies who have come to tea”. Characters in poems don’t usually reply. This one, however, did.
Susie Malcolm, Jean’s grown-up granddaughter, in ‘Nervosa Nouveau’ and ‘Visiting Grandparents’ writes about the situation from a different point of view. Three poems are inserted on a small separate publication inside the main pamphlet and I wanted a graphic for this too. So I cut a detail from the scene with the ducks. I knew, of course, that Alan would not be keen on this. The woodcut as a whole has its own balance and proportion. The slightly wonky edges and the degree of ‘grain’ are matters of some deliberation.
He returned a second set of prints, which are the ones that are on the publications now. One is the artifact again, this time with the faces more agog and with a hand pointing out the wonder of the thing. And there was one of adults, with children, in profile for the granddaughter insert.
I’m struggling with the technology this morning. It doesn’t like my files and won’t upload the granddaughter one. The main print, from the front cover of the pamphlet, however, is on the left.
So these are what we have used. Alan writes letters too, in spidery, almost indecipherable (but not quite) handwriting. Each one is signed, ‘Your woodcutter, Alan’.
Do you know how long these blogs take to write each Sunday morning? Breakfastward the ploughman plods his weary way. But how wonderful life is in its gifted twists and turns, its glorious papercuts, longcuts and woodcuts: “sheer plod makes plough down sillion / Shine.”
FREE VERSE HAMBOREE
The CB Editions Free Verse publishers event took place yesterday in London.
Two floors of small press publishers, a fabulous reading venue, a delightful little open air cafe on hand, a baking hot day — and free wine and ham with every HappenStance purchase, thanks to Matthew Stewart’s role as wine exporter and voluntary ambassador for the Extremadura region of Spain. So the HappenStance stall got a lot of interest.
Christopher Reid kicked off the action (you can just see him above, in the middle) with charm and brevity and panache.
The day included music, workshops, conversation, book buying, book bartering, book swapping, wine and ham. And a first-rate series of readings throughout the day, organised by Chrissy Williams and announced by CB Editions publisher Charles Boyle with a very large bell (see above). CB managed to look relaxed even in the middle of this mammoth feat of organisation.
You may spot Fiona Moore (above) assisting with sales, beside Matthew Stewart in his green stripey, ham-cutting apron. People talk about the unlikelihood of pigs flying. Well, part of one did — from Spain to London — and there it is on the ham stand. You can just see the cover of Marion Tracy’s The Giant in the Doorway in the right hand corner of the photo above — the one with what look like cut-out dolls. There was a fabulous reading space (see below). Couldn’t have been better.
Marion Tracy launched her debut publication, Giant in the Doorway, with a riveting reading, in front of that glorious mirror and red drapes. I didn’t photograph her in action because I didn’t want to put her off with paparazzi flashes, but I wish I had. I am a coward with a camera.
Matthew’s reading from his second pamphlet, Tasting Notes, required two voices, so I had the opportunity of being a marketing blurb persona. This, too, was accompanied by wine and ham. You can taste the wine yourself (links from the HappenStance shop to an online wine supplier).
The day was very friendly — lots of people to talk to and everyone in that sunny good humour that accompanies an extra bit of Summer when you’re not really expecting it. Food for mind, body and spirit.
Wonderful. And did I mention the wine and ham?
GET YOUR BLUSHFUL HIPPOCRENE HERE!
Do you believe in synchronicity?
It was Jung who coined the term, of course, and ever since I came across it, I’ve liked it. My mother’s a great believer in meaningful coincidence (which is much the same thing) and has some extraordinary examples.
My favourite’s the story of how she met Herr Buchholz. We were on holiday in Austria in 1966. We had never been abroad before (my sister was 10 and I was just 13), and my mother was determined to practise the German she had been studying in night school. She fell into conversation with a couple who were staying with their daughter at the same hotel. Naturally they asked where she came from and discovered it was a part of England one of them already knew. Mr Buchholz had been a prisoner of war, and was detained in Cheshire, near where my mother grew up. I don’t know what he was doing: perhaps he was a land worker of some kind.
Over the days they stayed in the same hotel, they continued to chat. They discovered they had, unknowingly, been in the same location together before, albeit not in Austria. It was over twenty years previously. My mother was a young woman in her teens and was working for a GP in Bowdon. Word came round that the King (George VI) was passing through. Not one to miss the opportunity of seeing royalty go past, my mother nipped out to view the royal progression (traffic moved slowly in those days). The streets in her part of Bowdon were deserted. She was the only person standing at the roadside apart from a man she didn’t know and didn’t speak to.
That man was Herr Buchholz, and here she was talking to him, nearly quarter of a century later at a hotel in Austria. Now there’s coincidence for you! Later his daughter Charlotte came to stay with us, to improve her English, and eventually I went to stay with them, to improve my German. Charlotte and I are still in touch.
All of which brings me to this week’s happy coincidence. I went to pick up Matthew Stewart’s new pamphlet Tasting Notes from The Dolphin Press. (It isn’t listed on the website yet).
Tasting Notes is, as the title suggests, about wine. The author works as a wine exporter for a Spanish co-operative in Extremadura. He’s also, of course, the originator of Inventing Truth, which came out in 2011 (Matthew blogs at Rogue Strands). Tasting Notes is very different from Matthew’s last publication. This time, the language of wine tasting and marketing merges with something delightfully unexpected. Each of four Zaleo wines has something to say for itself, and not quite what you’d expect.
But this brings me to the synchronicity. When I picked up the pamphlets this week, they were all packed in . . . wine boxes! Naturally I loved this detail, and saw it as particularly auspicious. I am, I think, the only poetry publisher who regularly dispatches boxes of books in car parts boxes (my other half works in a garage). I’ve always delighted in the inappropriateness of the packaging — this time it was the other way around.
Matthew’s Tasting Notes, when it finally makes it into our website shop, will have a link to a site where you can buy the wine to go with it, if you’d like to. This has proved a bit complicated, so it’s not yet accomplished. But not only will you be able to buy wine, you can get some free.
At the Poetry BookFair in London, on September 8th, you’ll see we’re opening the readings with the launch of that very pamphlet — and wine tasting! There will, in fact, not only be wine but, just as delicious, a chance to sample the Iberio ham celebrated in one of the poems. And afterwards, a whole complimentary glass of the blushful, if you make a purchase from HappenStance. It’s beautiful drinking, I’ve tried it, so it’s to be hoped I will be coherent. (Joke.) The event is at the Candid Arts Trust, near Angel Tube Station, easy to get to if in or near the capital. Do come along if you can: the programme for the whole day is fabulous.
Besides, there are actually two HappenStance pamphlets launching at the London Poetry Book Fair. The other is Marion Tracy’s Giant in the Doorway. More about that next week. . . .
THE MYSTERY OF JEAN MACKIE
Remember the puzzle of May 2011?
I had two blog entries last May about attempts to track down the mysterious Jean Mackie, author of the privately printed A Little Piece of Earth.
In Another Lost Poet, there are three poems by Jean and the story of how Alan Hill first sent me a copy of the original publication. The following week there was More about the Mysterious Jean Mackie, in which contact was made with Jean’s son Charlie.
Since then, much has happened, and I feel I know a little bit about the background to these poems. I’ve read the classic memoir by Jean’s husband, John R. Allan, Farmer’s Boy (I cannot imagine how I had missed reading this all my life). And I savoured John R. Allan’s North-East Lowlands of Scotland, which Charlie Allan reckons is his father’s masterpiece. I loved the chapter about the ballads, which connected beautifully with my own interest in these ancient narratives. And more recently I had a splendid time reading Them That Live The Longest, by Charlie himself, which describes Jean’s son’s own childhood and fills in even more of the background.
While all this was going on, I was type-setting most of Jean’s poems in a pamphlet (rather longer than the usual ones), and Charlie was writing a biographical introduction. He also sent me copies of poems by Jean’s granddaughter, herself mentioned in one of the Jean’s poems. Alan Dixon was generating woodcuts for the cover and Charlie was going through his mother’s papers to check whether there were more poems buried in her past (she died in 1991).
There were no more poems. The set that appeared under the title A Little Piece of Earth were a late flowering. As a teacher, and lecturer in drama, and journalist, she rejoiced in the printed word and loved poetry all her life, but she hadn’t always written her own. These poems seem to have been a sudden outburst, a response to the alarming process of suddenly finding herself . . . old.
When I was going through the endless process of checking the pages, setting the poems, moving this and that a hair space or so, I kept reading the poems. As I did so, the pages kept blurring because of the tears in my eyes. These are not all perfect pieces of literature (a few are outstandingly good), but each contains beautifully turned fragments, or wry asides, or attributes that are wholly personal to their author. They are extremely moving. Three poems by Jean’s granddaughter, Susie Malcolm, are included as an insert.
One mystery remains. The quotation from which the collection took its title is in the original, and I have added it to the HappenStance publication. But I haven’t managed to source it. I don’t know whether it’s from a poem or perhaps a popular saying. It could even be something a member of the family was known to have said. But if anybody recognizes it, please let me know:
Some ants carry their young
And some go empty
And all to and fro a little piece of earth
LET THEM READ CHOCOLATE!
From chocolate poems to the real thing. And not just any old chocolate either. . . .
Yesterday afternoon, Gillian and I went to Peebles for chocolate reasons. It was a fabulous day and the town was looking enchanting in rich August sunshine. The Peebles Show was in full flood and people were flocking.
We flocked right past the show car park, up the hill and into unit 7 of the Southpark Industrial Estate. Ah, it sounds ordinary, doesn’t it? It wasn’t.
Unit 7 is the tidily tucked away Chocolate & Confectionery School of Cocoa Black and that’s where we stayed for the rest of the afternoon. We were two of six beginners in a petits fours making class with world-class chocolatier Ruth Hinks.
When I say ‘world class’, I mean it. Ruth is not only one classy trainer (it was just like being with a celebrity chef in terms of dynamism and charisma), she’s one of five finalists for the UK Chocolate Master Title at Olympia in less than a month’s time. She’s also tall, elegant and beautiful—proof, if any were needed, that a diet of chocolate is life-enhancing.
Our afternoon at the petits fours workshop was amazing. It was also enormous fun. And we saw all the real stuff, the various ingredients in tubs and boxes and packets, and how they do it: the moulds, the racks, the chocolate mould scrapers, the melting tanks. The magical became possible.
While mixing and piping and scrutinizing and sprinkling, we were thinking about the HappenStance chocolate poem anthology, which is still taking shape. Discussions for its design are gathering momentum. It’s going to be a hardback book, and it will be lovely to read and hold, a direct route up Chocolate Parnassus.
With a bit of luck and nifty organization, subscriber contributors will come and help launch the book next year at quality chocolate centres round the UK.
Cocoa Black also have a chocolate shop, where you can have fabulous afternoon teas on Wednesdays and Sundays. We’ll try them for a potential HappenStand and chocolate poem launch. Watch this space—especially if you’re within range of the Scottish Borders.
HappenStance subscribers can continue to send in potential choc-lit until the end of this month. If you need inspiration for choc-po, try Hotel Chocolat (the Tasting Club is best because the chocolate’s freshly made) or send for some of Ruth’s from Cocoa Black. You don’t even have to write the poems. You can just eat the chocolates. . . .
A CREEL SPINNING OF THE CLOSE FLEET
‘You ask, Will this take long?‘
That’s the first line of Richie McCaffery’s first poem from Spinning Plates.
Niall Campbell observes, ‘How difficult it is returning’ and Theresa remarks, ‘We agree to reconvene in a few hours’.
Even from those first lines of the first poems you pick up their very different voices, the immediacy with which they dive straight in, without preamble or fuss.
These three were launched at StAnza last week, with splendid readings from the poets (we sold all the pamphlets on the bookstall). They are a unique set for HappenStance because all three are aged under thirty.
They therefore bring down the average age of the HappenStance poet significantly overnight, though two of them would be dead already if they were Keats. As it were . . .
Happily there are lots more copies in the spare bedroom, and they can be ordered now. Just click on the links below.
They are: