Tag: Featured Publication

Featured Publication – The Mayday Diaries by Robin Houghton

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Our featured publication for Autumn is The Mayday Diaries by Robin Houghton, published by Pindrop Press.

‘Robin Houghton is a poet who really notices things – silly and deadly serious, quotidian and extraordinary, often all at once – and knows precisely how to sift them so that only tight, resonant poems fall out. She makes ‘the debris of our private lives’ newly familiar and honestly strange, and never solely for sport, though she is playful too. The Mayday Diaries is a stylistically and thematically dextrous triumph in four unyieldingly inventive movements, and I don’t write that lightly.’ Rory Waterman

‘There’s so much delight and surprise in these poems. A clarity of diction to-gether with a playful reach and sense of experimentation, a formal agility and for all their dramatic storytelling and beguiling sense of humour, a persistent subtlety, an emotional tension in even the most light-hearted or casual lines. What do we feel when we hear the word Mayday? Alarm, fear, intrigue. And what do we hope to find in a diary? Intimate confessions, the inner workings of a psyche trying to make sense of the world. The unusual conflation of these two words in the title of the collection evokes perfectly the intense and every-day wonder at its heart.‘ Greta Stoddart

‘While Houghton’s foray into American corporate capitalism equips her witha satire-ready vocabulary, she is equally fluent in the idioms of another in- ferno – that of Dante – and the poems that show his influence are transcendent. Houghton writes with poignancy, humour, formal versatility and, most of all, a refreshing self-awareness that circumvents both self-aggrandizement and self-pity.‘ Kathryn Maris

The long-haired girls

Previously published in The Rialto

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Before the splicing

Previously published in Prole

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Break

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Robin Houghton is the author of four poetry pamphlets including Why? And Other Questions (Live Canon, 2020) which was a winner of the Live Canon Pamphlet Competition 2019. Her work has been published in many magazines including Mslexia, The Rialto and Poetry News, and is widely anthologised. She was awarded the Hamish Canham Prize from the Poetry Society in 2013. With Peter Kenny she founded the poets’ publishing collective Telltale Press in 2014, and their current project is the podcast Planet Poetry, begun during the 2020 pandemic. Born in London, Robin has lived and worked in Italy, Germany and the USA. After a marketing career with Nike and then Adidas, she obtained a masters degree in Digital Media in 2000 and ran her own online marketing business for over twenty years. She is now settled on the South coast of England. The Mayday Diaries is her first full poetry collection.

Copies of The Mayday Diaries are available to purchase from the Pindrop Press website, here.

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Featured Publication – How to Leave a Body by Holly Winter-Hughes

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Our featured publication for Summer is How to Leave a Body by Holly Winter-Hughes, published by Verve Poetry Press.

‘Holly Winter-Hughes’ visceral writing turns the human form inside-out, mapping the contours of trauma, abuse and hard-won resilience. It urges the reader to follow and ‘Breathe deep to the creak of your heartwood’. Darkly imaginative and pearled with fresh phrase-making, these are poems that compel attention and linger.‘ John McCullough

‘Holly’s poetry leaves red shapes on my skin, and teeth marks. Unapologetically incandescent images twist tightly and then open into wide, revelatory spaces. The thin blade of a plastic- handled knife flashes in the dark of cold-roomed poems, but beside my shoulder as I read there is always an older, kinder spirit. It says, ‘Look – this, yes, and this.’ And yet, somehow, the spirit is still singing. I love this collection.‘ Tom Hirons

‘Holly writes with the whiplash of thunder.’ Antony Owen

‘An electrifying poet with Plath-like power and potency. Such fire!‘ Anna Saunders

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Straight Girls Are Easier to Imitate

Previously published in Impossible Archetype

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Thin Air

Previously published in Clarion

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How to Find Your Way Home

Previously published in Lapidus Magazine

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Holly Winter-Hughes is especially passionate about using writing to express the stories we hold in our bodies. This comes through in both her poetry and her facilitation. Her work has been commissioned by various organisations including Apples & Snakes, Live & Local and Arvon. She has performed extensively across the UK including at Ledbury Poetry Festival, for Raise the Bar, for Cheltenham Poetry Festival and for the BBC. She is passionate about raising the voices of underrepresented people and as such, is the founder and CEO of The Word Association CIC (who have published over 30 anthologies from marginalised communities). She is currently studying for a Masters degree in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes, and starts her PhD in restorying the body in autumn 2025 at University of Birmingham. Holly is a widely published writer, most recently appearing in Atrium, Clarion, Impossible Archetype, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Lapidus and Tears in the Fence.

Copies of How to Leave a Body are available to purchase from the Verve Poetry Press website, or directly from Holly Winter-Hughes, here.

Featured Publication – The Price of Happiness by Nikki Robson

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Our featured publication for Spring is The Price of Happiness by Nikki Robson, published by V. Press.

‘The Price of Ηappiness neither holds back nor wastes a word in its tale of a marriage from unsettling omens (‘Goodness, I’m weeping said Mum’) to full-blown violent coerciveness (‘the sore in the wall/where the dinner was thrown’) and out through the numbness and the decree absolute to the glimmers of a new life (‘it crackled like fireworks,/illegal for so long’). You barely take a breath before you’re holding it in shock at the damage we do each other in the altogether too close up of a dysfunctional relationship. It is a tribute to Nikki Robson’s skill that this is accomplished without sentiment, catching our attention and our compassion entirely through telling detail and command of phrasing – these poems are constantly quotable in their exactitude – ‘my label of a husband’; ‘my mummy-smile’; ‘this Vitruvian boy’ – and are nowhere more moving than in their grasp of the impact on the children: ‘[I] tried to describe the end of her world/as the beginning of another’.‘ W. N. Herbert

‘‘The divorced cannot/bury their dead.’ Nikki Robson scours that truth, asks where it leads. We are used to graphic detonations of trauma, but here, the poet, well able to apply her ‘mummy-smile’, layers words, finds metaphor, draws deeply on sources and places. Unfolding her narrative, she never neglects a poet’s first responsibility: to language. These poems haunt as mere shock cannot.‘ Beth McDonough

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Signature dish

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Omens?

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Bone-weary

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First Laugh

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Nikki Robson was born and raised in Northern Ireland between Tyrone and Fermanagh, where she still regularly spends time with family and friends. Following 25 years in Scotland, she now lives in Suffolk. After a career in business, she obtained an MLitt in Writing Study and Practice from Dundee University. Her writing often explores relationships, place, associations and the idea of home, with poems published in many journals and anthologies. The Price of Happiness is her first pamphlet.

Copies of The Price of Happiness are available to purchase from the V. Press website, here.

Featured Publication – Deathless by Catherine Balaq

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Our featured publication for Winter is Deathless by Catherine Balaq, published by Verve Poetry Press.

Sex and death are truisms. We begin through the act of one and the other is the ultimate exit. This collection moves between the two, expanding on tropes of sexuality and creation acts with a core of sonnets that speak back to their origins. Both traditional and modern, the poems in Deathless turn the male gaze into the female subject and place life’s darkness in chiaroscuro contrast with beauty and light.

‘Catherine Balaq channels the daemon onto the page summoning colour from darkness.‘ Paul Lynch

‘Balaq’s words leave you breathless, burning through the page, reaching into the depths of you and making no apology for it. In ‘Deathless’ we are confronted with the complex, beautiful and exhilarating nature of being alive.’ Ophira Adar

‘Intimate, open-hearted and blazingly honest, the poems in Deathless establish Balaq as a distinctive and engaging voice. Memory and survival; wit and invention; attention to the indignities and the forcefulness of resilience; duty and wild abandon. It captures the beautiful and terrifying simultaneity of life: all of this is happening at once, is behind us, is coming our way.‘  Luke Kennard

‘Deathless turns a direct, unflinching gaze upon Freud’s twin drives – sex and death – and tracks the nuances of female desire, its ambivalences and contradictions, celebrating its incendiary agency with precision and control.‘ Meryl Pugh

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Object Relations

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Turning 30 in New York

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Whistle

Previously published in Poetry Wales, Spring 2023

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How to Winter

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Catherine Balaq is a writer and body psychotherapist. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and nominated for the Pushcart and Forward Prizes. She is co-editor of Black Cat Press. Her debut collection ‘animaginary’ was published in 2023. ‘Deathless’ is her second collection. Catherine also writes novels and is represented by Donald
Winchester at Watson Little.

Copies of Deathless are available to purchase from the Verve Poetry Press website, here.

Featured Publication – Tiny Bright Thorns by Jen Feroze

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Our featured publication for September and October is Tiny Bright Thorns by Jen Feroze, published by Nine Pens.

‘Tiny Bright Thorns is a love-song to the tender, fierce and ‘tar-thick’ days and nights of early motherhood, the ‘feathered cries of the new’. Rich in startling imagery, open-hearted and often movingly truthful, these poems shine – a ‘beacon’ passed from ‘mother to mother to mother’. How I wish I had read them as a new mother myself navigating those perilous, unmoored early weeks. Jen Feroze writes with grace and humanity of the ‘herbaceous bite/ of exquisite and terrifying love’ in all its forms and the power of imagination to connect us all.‘ Sarah Westcott

‘Playful, moving, tender and true; this pamphlet is a magical yet honest reflection on the wonder of motherhood. Nature, art and folklore run through these poems so deftly they continue to sing long after they’re put down. A joy.‘ Maria Ferguson

‘Dark yet tender and full of wonder, in these lyrical poems motherhood is an ocean as dangerous as it is beautiful. Feroze sculpts sleepless nights to show us each sharp shining star. A startling, stunning debut.’ Angela Readman

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Duality

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Previously published in Dust poetry magazine

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Self Portrait at 35 Weeks

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Previously published in Poetry Wales

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The Weather App Gives A 100% Chance Of Snow

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Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex. Her work has been featured in publications including Under the Radar, Poetry Wales, Magma, Black Iris, Berlin Lit, And Other Poems, One Hand Clapping, Okay Donkey and Butcher’s Dog. She won the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition in 2024 and placed second in the 2022/2023 Magma Editors Prize. Her pamphlet, Tiny Bright Thorns, is out now with Nine Pens. Jen loves chunky knitwear, turquoise things and cheese you can eat with a spoon. Find Jen @jenlareine on X and @jenferoze on Instagram

Copies of Tiny Bright Thorns are available to purchase from the Nine Pens website, here. Signed copies are available to purchase directly from Jen, here.

Featured Publication – Walrussey by Bex Hainsworth

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Our featured publication for July and August is Walrussey by Bex Hainsworth, published by Black Cat Poetry Press.

‘This brilliantly-titled collection describes an abundance of sea and shore creatures, capturing them in a visionary net of language. Here are poems bearing witness to the stoic innocence and the survival skills of jellyfish and manatee, ancient blind shark and sunfish. Meticulous and lyrical attention to detail is evident throughout; the poems are inventive, compassionate; they convey the fragility of life and the long planetary history we share with our fellow creatures.  Each creature is given resonant personhood. I have greatly enjoyed submerging myself in the wonders and the timely warnings of this collection.‘ Penelope Shuttle

‘In Bex Hainsworth’s Walrussey we take a dive into the poetry of witness to these “unusual shells”. Here are odes to the creatures of the sea, an “ocean in miniature”. Hainsworth’s poems develop our empathy for her sea creations, from the glorious cathedral of a whale to an early morning manatee. This connection to a fragile environment enables us, like the Octopus in her opening poem, to see the beauty in the fragile.‘ Jessica Mookherjee

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Walrussey

Previously published on Atrium

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An Octopus Picks Litter at the End of the World

Previously published in Typehouse Magazine, nominated for a Pushcart Prize

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Consider the Selkie

Previously published in Visual Verse

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Blue Lobster

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Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher who was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and is currently based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and has been shortlisted in the Welsh Poetry Competition, Waltham Forest Poetry Competition, and the AUB International Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Atrium, Ink Sweat & Tears, Honest Ulsterman, bath magg, and One Hand Clapping. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by The Black Cat Poetry Press. Twitter: @PoetBex Instagram: @poet.bex Bluesky: @poetbex.bsky.social

Copies of Walrussey are available to purchase from the Black Cat Poetry Press website here.

Featured Publication – The Sessions by Jonathan Totman

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Our featured publication for May and June is The Sessions by Jonathan Totman, published by Pindrop Press.

The fifty sonnets of this collection explore talking therapy from the perspective of client and therapist. Drawing on the author’s work as a clinical psychologist, as well as his experiences of being in therapy, the poems pay tribute to the healing power of conversation while also interrogating the complications and contradictions of the process: what does it mean when care is boxed into a time-limited consultation? What happens within and between us when the personal, professional and political collide? ‘The Sessions’ is a compassionate, humane look at how we hide and reveal parts of ourselves; how we change and how we don’t. It is a book, ultimately, about connection.

‘I so loved this collection: the skills of a clinical psychologist – of intelligent empathy, compassion and of close attention- are qualities that well serve this poet. It is a beautifully written work, but also fascinating in the way that gets behind the mask and finds there uncertainties and frailties but also always kindness, gentleness and warmth. A collection that casts light on the intricate workings of the human psyche and the art of healing in stunning lines of poetry. If nature is therapy, let this hour be the shoreline.‘ Deb Alma

‘I absolutely loved this collection. ‘The Sessions’ is a well-written, acutely observed collection of sonnets exploring the role of the psychologist. What does it mean ‘to hear a thousand traumas humming in the bodies of passers-by’? These poems capture those ‘uncleaned corners’ of life, then send you out ‘past the buses and the wheelie bins, your mind decorated with the deep-down knowledge of your goodness.’ Immensely enjoyable.‘ Elisabeth Sennitt Clough

‘A fascinating and formally coherent collection that draws on the poet’s first-hand experience of psychotherapy, offering us a privileged insight into his world. Exploring the day to day of professional practice, Totman takes a compelling and highly original perspective on work and human relations, love and relationships, childhood, parenthood and play. Each sonnet is a room, a session, a question, an interrogation, a reflection, a realisation, each poem a vignette informed by life and observation, concerned with knowing others and in turn the self. A journey of beautifully crafted poems that celebrate the business and rituals of witness behind closed doors, the passing of minutes in words and silence, the things hard to say, the holding back and letting go, the rehearsals of loss, the quiet catastrophes.‘ Paul Stephenson

‘With a frankness so thorough it’s almost disconcerting, Totman draws back the veil on the therapist/patient dynamic. His nuanced reading of the atmospheric pressure in the therapy consultation-room produces lines that shock, jolt, soothe and ultimately bring us back to ourselves. These are restless, humane, questing poems where linguistic deftness is matched by a forensic compassion.‘ Claudine Toutoungi

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Behind Closed Doors

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The Tracks

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The Journey

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Reckoning

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Jonathan Totman is a clinical psychologist and poet, currently living and working in Oxfordshire. He trained at University College London, qualifying in 2013, and has since worked in various NHS, university and charity-sector mental health services. His pamphlet, Explosives Licence, was a winner in the 2018 iOTA Shot Competition and his debut collection, Night Shift, was published by Pindrop Press in 2020. Website/blog: https://www.jonathantotman.co.uk Twitter: @jonathan_totman

Copies of The Sessions are available to purchase from the Pindrop Press website, here.


Featured Publication – (m)othersongs by Sarah Doyle

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Our featured publication for March and April 2024 is (m)othersongs by Sarah Doyle, published by V. Press.

‘(m)othersongs is a moving, visceral exploration of the othering nature of un-motherhood.
Body shame, medical misogyny and grief are exorcised in shape-shifting forms with veins of
pain running through them, in which everything from cloud formations to sea gooseberries on
a shoreline speak of the changing seasons of the human body. This is a world where ‘wooden
babies’ and rag dolls are born in place of children, and the womb – a ‘special bedroom’
haunted by endometriosis, fibroids and myths of creation – is surrendered with the mantra –
‘it’s only a pocket, and one you’re not using’. Both heartbreaking and strangely transporting,
these are powerful and necessary poems.‘ Polly Atkin

‘(m)othersongs is one of those rare examples of a collection of poetry that is both moving in
content and accomplished in form. Each poem is expertly crafted, with a skilled use of
structured form alongside beautifully crafted free verse. This textured and vibrant collection
does not hold back, it faces the pain of endometriosis and infertility and holds that pain up to
the light as valid experience of womanhood. The poetry world is enriched by this collection,
and I shall return to it.‘ Wendy Pratt

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Sarah Doyle is the Pre-Raphaelite Society’s Poet-in-Residence. Her poetry has been published in journals including Spelt Magazine, Wild Court, Under the Radar, Atrium, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Finished Creatures, and The Lonely Crowd; and in anthologies from publishers such as Broken Sleep, The Emma Press, Paper Swans, Shoreline of Infinity, and Places of Poetry. Sarah won 1st prize in the Ver Poets Open Poetry Competition 2023, was highly commended in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry 2023, and was longlisted in the 2022 National Poetry Competition. She is a former winner of the William Blake Poetry Prize, the Wolverhampton Literature Festival poetry competition and Holland Park Press’s Brexit in Poetry; and has been a runner-up in the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize and Keats-Shelley Essay Prize. A pamphlet of poems collaged from fragments of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals – Something so wild and new in this feeling – was published by V. Press in 2021, and her second pamphlet, (m)othersongs, was released by the same publisher in autumn 2023. More at Sarah’s website: sarahdoyle.co.uk

Copies of (m)othersongs are available to purchase from the V. Press website, here.

Featured Publication – Collecting the Data by Mat Riches

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Our featured publication for January and February 2024 is Collecting the Data by Mat Riches, published by Red Squirrel Press.

Mat Riches offers a rare treat in this debut collection. In a voice that’s variously wry, thoughtful, witty and emotive, he explores a variety of relationships. Prepare to meet his family, but also his tomato plants, a weather balloon, a troublesome supertanker, a fisherman’s pond and the Arecibo Telescope. At one point, he finds himself with his head ‘wedged in the freezer’. This is—yes—funny, but this poet is not just out for laughs. He writes from an unusual angle and it’s deliberate. He uses words to write about silence. Expect the unexpected.

‘Mat Riches is a specialist in the humorous use of the serious and the serious use of the humorous, channelled through a playful but yoked relish for language.‘ Matthew Stewart

‘These poems show us love, with all its limits, hopes and regrets, its crucial specificities of Sunblest, the Wim Hof Method and buttered dogs. They’re heartfelt but not saccharine, often funny but never cynical. Most importantly, they ring true, like the birdsong from the poem ‘A Foley Artist Works from Home’: “only ever birds / being themselves”.‘ Ramona Herdman

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Previously published in The High Window

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Previously published in Algebra of Owls

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Previously published in The Honest Ulsterman

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Previously published in Ink Sweat and Tears

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Mat Riches is from Norfolk, but lives in Beckenham. He has previously worked in a plastics factory, a variety of pubs, and a book wholesaler, but currently works in market research and as ITV’s (unofficial) poet-in-residence. He’s also a trainee Bongosero. When he’s not doing those things, he’s either being a parent, a husband or running. Sometimes all of them at once. He co-runs Rogue Strands poetry evenings, and blogs at Wear The Fox Hat. One of these facts is not true.

Copies of Collecting the Data can be purchased from the Red Squirrel Press website, here.

Featured Publication – Some of These Stories are True by Maurice Devitt

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Our featured publication for September and October is Some of These Stories are True by Maurice Devitt, published by Doire Press.

‘Maurice Devitt is a unique voice in contemporary Irish poetry. In Some of These Stories are True he continues to tantalise us with poems brimming with playfulness, imagination and beauty. These poems are lifted from life – often slant versions of lives – and are fuelled by a poetic perception that is wise and uncanny. These lines from ‘Cherry Blossom’ encapsulate the essence of his oeuvre: ‘…the joy of life is often to be found / in the comfort of repetition, reassurance of the mundane, / and just the occasional instance of perfection.’ Brian Kirk

‘Maurice Devitt’s second collection Some of These Stories are True contains many worlds, including a rich inner world, the world of work, the world of innocence, childhood and the past. He depicts an older Ireland with an almost hermetic quality in his poem ‘Antimacassar’, with descriptions of flocked wallpaper and powdery silence. As he says in his poem ‘Dippy Eggs’ (and who of a certain age doesn’t remember them?): ‘For everything there is a perfect point of lift-off / Missed, and the chance is gone.’
And lift-off is what these poems do – often philosophical, sometimes playful – the narrative voice offers us a view of the familiar and everyday in a new light, containing nuggets of wit and wisdom.’ Jean O’Brien

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Born in Dublin, Maurice Devitt completed an MA in Poetry Studies at Mater Dei following a 30-year career in Insurance & Banking. His debut collection ‘Growing Up in Colour’ was published by Doire Press in 2018. His poems have featured in a significant number of journals, both in Ireland and internationally, and been nominated for Pushcart, Forward and Best of the Net prizes. He is a past winner of the Trócaire/Poetry Ireland, Poems for Patience and Bangor Poetry Competitions, and has been placed or shortlisted in many others, including The Patrick Kavanagh Award, The Listowel Collection Competition and Cúirt New Writing Award. Maurice is the chairperson of The Hibernian Writers’ Group, and his Pushcart-nominated poem, ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology of the group’s work published by Alba Publishing in 2015. He is curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies Facebook page where he posts featured poems, news and poetry articles on a daily basis.

Copies of Some of These Stories are True can be purchased for the Doire Press website.