A Retirement Note

The first ever Valley Press book cover.

Don't worry, it's not me retiring - that would be a short career!  (Though it is a tempting thought.)  This post is just to announce that as of this week, VP0001, The Waiting Game, is officially 'out of print' and no longer available anywhere.

Viewers with a strong historical memory will recall The Waiting Game was written by myself when I was 19, so to some extent it was the perfect text to experiment on, as far as publishing goes.  The retiring edition is (to put it mildly) not quite as professional a job as the current VP titles, so when Amazon sold their last copy this week, I decided not to print any more - thus, the book is now out of print.

However, I have kept two copies of this edition - one for the 'archive', and one extra one which I will be attempting to sell for an extraordinary price from this point onwards.  If anyone would like to get in with an offer early, you know where the contact page is - don't be shy!  And I may well do another edition at some point... we'll see.

In print for 3 years, 221 days, TWG holds the record for 'VP book in print for the longest time'.  This will be broken on May 10th 2013 by Nigel Gerrans' Tenebrae, assuming I keep printing that one!  (If you're wondering about VP0002, that's been unavailable for a while... I was just too busy to tell you... same deal with the 'spare copy for extraordinary price' there.)  I like to keep an eye on these records - keeps me occupied!  As ever, lots of exciting new books in the pipeline; keep your eyes on the site and subscribed to the newsletter for all the details.

'Sea Swim' Review - by Christian Ward

I'm delighted to post the first review of John Wedgwood Clarke's Sea Swim, reviewed by poet and writer Christian Ward.  Valley Press is currently working on Christian's first full-length collection, The Moth House, scheduled for October 2012 - his literary accolades include first prize at the East Riding Open Poetry Competition in 2010, and look out for a poem by Christian in Poetry Review this summer.

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The sea has inspired poets for centuries; Elizabeth Bishop, for instance, famously compared the sea off Nova Scotia to knowledge in her poem ‘At the Fishhouses’: “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, / drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world".

The sea around Scarborough is the inspiration for Sea Swim, John Wedgwood Clarke’s pamphlet. Written as part of imove, a Cultural Olympiad Programme in Yorkshire, this 18 poem sequence is a great showcase for Clarke’s talent for creating original metaphors and stunning images. Diving in (pardon the pun), the reader feels how the sea can transform on an emotional and spiritual level.

Clarke has a knack for recording detail in an imaginative way. A swimmer surfacing in his dark wetsuit is ‘like a cormorant’ (“Rings”), beach chalets are ‘small wooden stanzas’ (“Beach chalets”), a warship’s red flag is like a ‘pilot fish’ (“Warship, South Bay”) and a spider is ‘auburn-legged’ (“Winter Minutes”). The reader becomes part of this landscape with these intimate details.

There is a strong emotional undercurrent in these poems, felt in poems such as “Hydro”, where Clarke compares his shadow to a ‘frisky amoeba blundering in another world’ and the tender “Winter Minutes”, where there is ‘nothing to record but your absence’. The sea can take away just as easily as it can give back. Language, emotion and the real, physical, are all fleeting here.

Sea Swim is an excellent pamphlet. John Wedgwood Clarke’s deft imagery and knack for creating poetry with depth makes him one you need to read. Much enjoyed.

National Poetry Month (Pt. 2): Charles Baudelaire

Mario Praz once wrote Charles Baudelaire was a poet "in whom the Romantic Muse distilled her most subtle poisons." Having a slight handle on the French language, I couldn't agree more. Take L'Ennemie, par exemple:

The Enemy

My youth was nothing but a storm of shadows

Star-crossed, here and there, by the occasional sun-shaft.

Thunder rolled, rain ravaged (mourning skies)--

My tree never had a chance for fruit to speak of.

I live in the great fall of the mind, now,

Reaping not what I sow, the earth dark and deep (hanging sweet, hanging low).
I dig at trenches--water seeps, mud heaps onto sluit graves.

The meaninglessness of toil, life--tell me, what is it worth?

Will that of which I dream ever bear ripe with ripening fruit?

No, it is pain, pain--she eats at the marrow of life.

The great obscure Enemy sucks the blood, gnaws the strength

right out of me.*

*translation & photographie by Cora Charis

National Poetry Month (Part 1): Pablo Neruda

It's that time o' the year, so it's time for Neruda.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez claimed Pablo Neruda was "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language." Having a slight hold on the Spanish language, I have a difficult time disagreeing. Take Sonnet 66, por ejemplo:

I do not love you except (because) I love you:

I move from loving to not loving you;

waiting, not waiting for you--

back & forth, through my heart, from ice to fire. 

I only love (you) because I love you.

I love; I hate without end, and hating you 


pray to you, and the measure of my changing love

is not to see you but to love you blindly.

{Perhaps January's light will devour, 

its cruel-intentioned ray, my whole heart,

stealing the key to life's rest.}

In this history only I die, 

die of love because I love you,

because I love you, Love, in fire and in blood.*

Kind of hard to compete with that. 

*translation & photographie by Cora Charis