Books by Poetry Society Youth Member Alumni

Jay Bernard

The title of Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl is taken from Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. "In retrospect, I think I was looking to explore a similar kind of womanly introspection - full of nightmares, infatuation and lunacy. I wrote most of the poems between 16 and 19, and almost all were written with readings in mind. The pamphlet itself came out of a 'pilot series' tall-lighthouse had created, Roddy Lumsden was my editor and it was the Poetry Book Society's pamphlet choice for summer 2008'.

Caroline Bird

Caroline Bird's playful and surreal poems have a startling vibrancy. Her first collection Looking Thorugh Letterboxes was published in 2002, her follow up collection Trouble Came to the Turnip came out in 2006. Caroline's latest book Watering Can launched at the end of November.

Sarah Howe

Sarah Howe's debut (A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia) offers great range [and] a series of poetic endeavours which nourish and reward. Some of the work here reflects her dual heritage in one of her longer pieces she describes travelling to China and Hong Kong where she spent her childhood, to trace her mother's roots. She also offers imaginistic shorter poems and edgier forays into more experimental terrain. She is a poet of place, from the limited landscapes of bed to the grand vistas of exploration (Roddy Lumsden).

Michael McKimm

In Still This Need Michael McKimm explores the complex beauty of the world we live in, and how we try to understand our place in it. From the wide skies of his native Antrim glens to the secret damp corners of urban England, McKimm's richly musical verse evokes a haunting landscape against which the intricacies of memory, myth, history and love begin to unfold.
 

Helen Mort 

Helen has published two collections of poetry. The shape of every box (published 2007) is her debut pamphlet with tall-lighthouse press, and presents twenty poems of people and place, some of which previously appeared as winning poems in the Foyle competition. A pint for the ghost (published 2009) is a sequence of poems inspired by South Yorkshire legend: a night-time encounter with the ghosts of worked out mines, smoky pubs and deserted highways. Helen is currently poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust.
 

Richard O'Brien

Charlotte Runcie

Charlotte's poems are about journeys, internal and external, real and imagined. Using both strict form and free verse, her pamphlet tells stories of the everyday alongside semi-mythical beings and strange landscapes, from the bottom of the sea to outer space. Charlotte's pamphlet Seventeen Horse Skeletons is available from tall-lighthouse.

Laura Seymour

Herb Robert' grew out of the 2009 Flarestack Press pamphlet competition, Being shortlisted in this competition, and being invited to submit a new collection to the editors, Meredith Andrea and Jacqui Rowe, for consideration. It is a collection of poems written around the theme of the plant herb robert (it's in each of them somewhere), in particular, the myth that if you pick it, someone will come and take you away.  

Charlotte Trevella

Charlotte Trevella has been hailed as a poetry phenomenon in her home country of New Zealand. Her first collection, Because Paradise, was published in 2009. Her work explores the minutaie of relationships and is strongly influenced by the geographic and social landscape of New Zealand.
 

Luke Yates

Thinking Inside The Box is a presentation of Luke's primary findings after spending a month in a small box with Ron Silliman, Donald Barthelme, Louisa M Alcott and Henry Brown in the famously creamy city of Philadelphia. Published by PIFAS Press, copies can be bought directly from the author yates.luke@gmail.com