The Best British Poetry 2014 - Softcover

Mark Ford; Roddy Lumsden

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1907773681 ISBN 13: 9781907773686

Publisher: Salt Publishing, 2014

Synopsis

Best British Poetry

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Ford was born in 1962 in Nairobi, Kenya. He has published three collections of poetry, Landlocked (1991), Soft Sift (2001), and Six Children (2011). He has also published a biography of the French writer Raymond Roussel. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and a selection of his reviews and essays have been published in two volumes, A Driftwood Altar (2005) and Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays (2011). He is currently editing an anthology of the poetry of London for Harvard University Press. Roddy Lumsden (born 1966) is a Scottish poet, who was born in St Andrews. He has published five collections of poetry, a number of chapbooks and a collection of trivia, as well as editing a generational anthology of British and Irish poets of the 1990s and 2000s, Identity Parade. He lives in London where he teaches for The Poetry School. Emily Berry's debut poetry collection Dear Boy (Faber & Faber, 2013) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Hawthornden Prize. She is a contributor to The Breakfast Bible (Bloomsbury, 2013), a compendium of breakfasts. She is currently working towards a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. John Burnside was born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland. He studied English and European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since 1996. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Light Trap (2001) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Anthony Caleshu is the author of two books of poetry and a novella His poems and stories have appeared widely in journals and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Dublin Review, American Literary Review, and Agni Online. He is the editor of the literary journal Short FICTION and teaches at the University of Plymouth in South West England. Sian Melangell Dafydd is the author of Y Trydydd Peth (The Third Thing), which won the 2009 National Eisteddfod Literature Medal. She is the co-editor of the literature review Taliesin and www.yneuadd.com and writes in both Welsh and English. Matthew Francis is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is a poet and novelist whose most recent collection is Dragons (Faber, 2001). His work has won the TLS / Blackwell's Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize (twice) and the Welsh Book of the Year Award. He is the editor of W.S. Graham's New Collected Poems (Faber, 2004). Kirsten Irving was born in Lincolnshire, lives and works in London and is one half of the team (with Jon Stone) behind cult handmade magazine Fuselit and collaborative poetry press Sidekick Books. In 2010 she co-authored the concept pamphlet No, Robot, No! Her pamphlet What To Do was released in 2011 by Happenstance. Lydia Macpherson grew up in the sixties in a small village on top of the Yorkshire Pennines. She now lives in very flat East Anglia. Lydia has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway University of London. She has been placed in several competitions, including the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize. Her poems range from the 'domestic gone awry' to the homeliness of the International Space Station. Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His poetry collections are The Hutton Inquiry and Zeppelins. He has recorded a CD with The Poetry Archive and written a play Shad Thames, Broken Wharf, which was performed at the London Word Festival and subsequently published by Penned in the Margins in 2010. He works as a Librarian at The Poetry Library, London, and teaches for The Poetry School. Jon Stone was born in Derby and currently lives in Whitechapel. He's the co-creator of pocket poetry journal Fuselit and micro-anthology publishers Sidekick Books. He was highly commended in the National Poetry Competition 2009, the same month his debut pamphlet, Scarecrows (Happenstance), was released. George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He was educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Otto Orban, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Agnes Nemes Nagy. He co-edited Bloodaxe's Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books are The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; New & Collected Poems (2008) and The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. Bloodaxe has also published John Sears' critical study Reading George Szirtes (2008). Szirtes lives in Norfolk and teaches at the University of East Anglia. Rebecca Tamas was born in London in 1988. She studied at the University of Warwick and at the University of Edinburgh, where she won the Grierson Verse Prize. Her poems have been published in a variety of magazines and journals including Magma, Oxford Poetry and The SHOp. She is currently studying for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at The University of East Anglia. This is her first book of poems. Mark Waldron's first book, The Brand New Dark was published by Salt Publishing in 2008. His work appears in Identity Parade, New British and Irish Poets published by Bloodaxe in 2010. He lives in east London with his wife and son. John Hartley Williams grew up in London. He worked as a teacher in France, the former Jugoslavija, and West Africa, and has made his home in Berlin since 1976. Williams has published many collections of poetry. A retrospective volume, The Ship, was published by Salt in 2007. A novel, Death Comes For The Poets, co-written with Matthew Sweeney, will appear from the Muswell Press in 2012 as will a new collection of poems Assault On The Clouds from Shoestring.

Review:

...the boy Ford done good, has done us proud, has played a blinder. I have never come across a London anthology... as rich, as bold, as multifarious as this... Olympic visitors should lug this brick back home for a pungent souvenir of the original "maximum city" in all it grot and grandeur... -- Boyd Tonkin * The Independent * Mark Ford has gathered together poems born of London, in conversation with London, in combat with London, in awe of London, most of which were first published in London, centre of print and power. Covering six and a half centuries of wandering, whoring, watching, drinking, dancing, praying, building, courting, and cursing, here can be found Wordsworth's `endless stream of men and moving things', even when, as Fleur Adcock puts it, `the traffic's as abominable as ever'. Packed as the Underground, this is as essential a guide to London as the A-Z. -- Frances Wilson

About this edition

• Publisher: Salt Publishing
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1907773681
• ISBN 13: 9781907773686
• Binding: Paperback