Thinking about Buying Presents?

Keith Sagar – Biographer of Ted Hughes, author of Literature and the Crimes against Nature:

Road Kill may sound like a rather morbid theme for a collection of poems. There is indeed pathos…but there is a constant celebration of the seasons and cycles of the life of the countryside.
The holistic, biocentric vision widens in the later poems to embrace folklore and mythology. All this in a luminous accessible verse.

I Once Knew a Poem who Wore a Hat  – by Emma Purshouse and artist Cath Pascall Moore – Wonderful poems for reading aloud with funny brilliant illustrations £6.99 More details here

WINNER of the Poetry Category of the Rubery Book Awards 2016  THE RUBERY BOOK AWARDS JUDGES SAY:
Lots of wonderful imaginative and outrageous poems in this collection which is full of the charms and idiosyncrasies of childhood. It’s easy to see how children could love these breezy poems and become attached to them. One could easily imagine them being learnt by heart and repeated in playgrounds. The illustrations by Catherine Pascall Moore are quirky and appropriate. The hints about, for example, the best way to learn a poem or how to speak a poem aloud, are unusual in a book of this sort and never patronising.

Emma’s poems are full of life and laughs, bubbling with music and wisdom and silliness and jokes and cute animals.
She’s a great performer of her work and the book is crammed with tips to help the reader become a performer too.
And as if that weren’t enough, Catherine’s fine and funny pictures add another dimension to the book (a picture-y dimension)
A.F.Harrold – Bloomsbury Children’s Poet and has had his work on BBC Radio 4, Radio 3 and BBC7

The Grandpa Years  – by Keith Chandler – Poems on getting old and the wonder of grandchildren… £3.99 More details here

Jan Fortune reviewing in envoi magazine:

In The Grandpa Years Keith Chandler continues the Fair Acre Press style of unfussy language with something to say.
A sequence of thirteen poems on the theme of becoming a grandfather and tracing an arc from ultrasound to getting ready to school, this is a whimsical and unashamedly intimate pamphlet from the first line.
But there are serious questions running through this pleasing pamphlet, such as why it is that we become besotted with toddlers..
It is these questions and the recognition of mortality that elevates this sequence from a private tribute to a life-event into a lyrical consideration of change and time.

Sitting Ducks by Lisa Blower – a gritty black comedy-drama set in Stoke-on-Trent £9.99 More details here

Contemporary Small Press – Although Blower does not shy away from the grim realities of parts of post-industrial Britain, the novel’s strength lies in its frenetic pacing and pitch-black humour which makes Sitting Ducks anything but a struggle. The ‘plot’ of the novel is at times undoubtedly bleak, yet the rhythm and force of Blower’s linguistically dexterous prose gives Sitting Ducks an urgency its subject matter deserves. Go here for the full review

Stuart Maconie – A livid and unapologetic evocation of a world most novels and novelists never get near.