Berliners is a poem that originated from a conversation in Berlin. After several visits to Berlin, and a recent work assignment there with the German Film Academy, John Simmons became fascinated by the role of the city in 20th century world history. From the First World War to the Weimar Republic; the rise of the Nazis leading to the next world war; followed by the Cold War, the separation of the city by a wall into east and west representing opposed ideologies; then eventually the destruction of the wall by the people and the reunification of Germany. Berlin was at the centre of the conflict and drama that shaped the modern world, and its history still resonates today.

The poem tells the story of the 20th century through a tableau of vivid scenes brought to life by a diversity of poetic forms – all seen through the lens of the people and places of this one extraordinary city, Berlin.

Derrick Porter grew up in Hoxton and began to write poetry from the age of thirteen. In his early forties he joined a Writing for Pleasure group tutored by the poet Ted Walter who suggested he send his poems to Envoi, and it was during the editorship of J C Meredith Scott that Porter’s poems began to appear alongside mainstream poets. In 2002 he joined the Poetry School where, under the guidance of Mimi Khalvati, he became part of the wider poetry scene. His poems have been published in Magma, Acumen, Interpreter House, he New Writer, Brittle Star, Poetry Review, The Long Poem Magazine, and in two anthologies: I Am Twenty People, and This Little Stretch of Life. He has also enjoyed success in a number of poetry competitions.

L. B. Jørgensen has a degree in English and History and lived in England for five years before returning to her native Denmark. She has travelled the world as a digital nomad while doing translations and subtitles for TV, and now lives in Copenhagen. Her poetry has been published in several literary magazines and her poem The Landscape of My Heart was nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize. A Woman Travelling is her debut pamphlet.

This anthology presents a second volume of work from Dark Angels, an organisation dedicated to personal development through writing. Much of it is inspired by the ‘Grow’ theme of the 2023 Bloomsbury Festival, for which many poems here were written. The volume highlights poetry from members of the Dark Angels Circle, in particular featuring the American writer Jonathan Holt.

Set in the marshlands and harshlands of east London, this urban pastorale long poem explores the ‘edgeland’, a landscape of wreckage of war and industry—railway sidings, sewage works, filter beds, impounded and culverted rivers, and abandoned factories—populated by veterans, redundant workers, displaced people, Travellers, migrants, asylum seekers. It is their voices and traces of their presence in the landscape and in the language which resonate.

Roger Huddle was born in Walthamstow and left school at the age of fifteen to spend six years as an apprentice compositor in the print industry. Qualifying in 1967, he soon found these historic skills were becoming obsolete and so became a graphic designer. He has since pursued his love of poetry, art and photography, first at Birkbeck University and then at Norwich School of Art and Design where he obtained his MA in Writing the Visual.

Working on this collection with Paekakariki Press marks his return to the compositor’s frame in over 50 years.

Tales from Norse mythology of Loki's second child—Fenris the Wolf— viewed through a twentieth century lens by Mark Vernon Thomas with illustrations by Helen Moss.

The first book of poetry from international writers' group Dark Angels, featuring work by Thérèse Kieran, Tim Rich, and John Simmons.

Thérèse Kieran is a Belfast based poet and visual artist. Dark Angels has played a huge part in her creative journey since she first flexed her wings in 2014.

Tim Rich's writing and images have appeared in magazines and journals, including Oscillations, Random Spectacular and arterial. His piece Landfall, a poem and four photographs, was exhibited at the 2022 Bloomsbury Festival.

John Simmons is the co-founder of two influential writing organisations—Dark Angels and 26. His published novels are Leaves, Spanish Crossings and The Good Messenger.

Sometime, in a Churchyard is a collaborative project, which began in 2020, between artist Charlotte Harker and poet Louise Warren. The poems and drawings are inspired by many visits to the Old St Pancras churchyard in London, and through the changing seasons, their observations of the small ancient church with its surrounding buildings and wildlife all took on different meanings-symbolic, historical, literary, and personal.

"I think this work deserves a wide readership as both poet and artist show immense skill and sensitivity in presenting words and images gathered over time and seasons. The artist Harker keeps us rooted in reality with her drawings of what actually exists, allowing the poet Warren freedom to take flight and indulge her imagination."

Robert Selby, London Grip

As lockdown approached in March 2020 and life was concentrated on the domestic, Dennis Tomlinson started to write short poems reflecting on household and garden ornaments and their deeper significance. He took Colin Pink's triadic couplet form as his model. A few poems open out into public spaces. Five have corresponding illustrations by Lauren Catling.

Dennis has two previous poetry pamphlets to his name, Sleepless Nights (Maverick Mustang Manuscripts, 2019) and Over the Road (Dempsey & Windle, 2021).

In 2013, over a drink, poets Julia Bird and Mike Sims challenged each other to learn John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by heart, a conversation that was to be the catalyst to A Joy Forever – a series of events at Keats House, London, Keats-Shelley House, Rome, and UK literary festivals, and now a new book based on the life and writing of Keats, published by Paekakariki Press.

A Joy Forever – A Walk Out with John Keats by Julia Bird & Mike Sims is a compendium of what their first challenge to one another inspired: readings of Keats’ poems and letters with entertainments, games and food, and a playful, social exploration of Keats’ life and writings.

Loosely arranged by theme – letter-writing, fame, play, water, nightingales and walking – the book comprises a little hero worship, some Keatsian enthusiasms and diversions (games, recipes, pilgrimages), a favourite Keats poem or letter or two, and new poems by Bird and Sims. The book fuses serious attention to Keats’ writing and history with a more light-hearted approach, and it will appeal to Keats readers, enthusiasts and fellow-travellers everywhere.

Mark Floyer has spent the last six years living and researching his ancestral home county of Devon. This pamphlet collection follows on from Crow Dusk (Paekakariki Press, 2018) and explores themes of memory, place, belonging and loss in the main. He has also recently brought out a cricketing/teaching memoir Chasing Balloons (Charlcombe Books, 2019). Now retired from teaching, he has moved to Sussex.

A new collection of poems by Colin Pink, featuring twelve woodcut illustrations by Daniel Goodwin.

The collection hinges around an eponymous epic poem which relates the human cost of a fishing tragedy off Cornwall in 1962. It includes twelve sonnets and ten triolets, reflecting Colin's interest in formal poetic structures, though the subject matter and treatment is anything but. "Love, death, disaster and politics!" is how Colin sometimes summarises his work.

Annette Volfing is Danish, grew up in Geneva and now lives in Oxford where she teaches medieval German literature.  She has previously published a pamphlet (‘Ecliptic’) with Black Light Engine Room.  Much of her spare time is now devoted to learning Finnish.

Natalija Ganina specialises in Germanic Philology at Moscow State University.  She is also a visual artist who often draws inspiration from literature.

Kathryn Southworth's celebration of the enigma that is Virginia Woolf. With seven line drawings by Charles Perrett.

Kathryn Southworth is a retired academic. She was a founding fellow of the English Association, Vice Principal of Newman University College, review manager for QAA, governor in mental health and Rose Bruford Drama College.

Charles Perrett is an artist and poet. He attended Goldsmith’s College School of Art in the early sixties and taught art in various schools in London and Worcester.

Pat Francis's childhood was shaped by the Luftwaffe raids on London during WWII. In this delightful collection of poems she draws on her memories of nights in the air-raid shelter, and on the history of West Ham and Bethnal Green, — poverty, weavers, music hall, poets in Epping Forest. The poems are gathered into four groups: Some Londoners, Blitz, Five Victorian Vignettes, and In the Forest.

This beautifully illustrated collection of poems grew out of Ruth Wiggins’ experience of two months spent hiking in Mongolia.

Ruth lives in East London but loves the great outdoors and her work often reflects this. Her work has been widely published in anthologies and journals, most recently: Poetry, Poetry Review, Perverse, Blackbox Manifold, Long Poem, Strix, Contemporary Haibun Online and The Wolf. Her first pamphlet, Myrtle, was published by The Emma Press in 2014.

Isabel Bermudez lives in Orpington, Kent. She holds degrees from Cambridge University (Modern Languages) Salford University (Documentary and Television Features). She specialized in documentary television in Colombia and is a tutor of Spanish and French. Her most recent collection Madonna Moon won the Coast to Coast to Coast Mini Portfolio Competition in 2018. This is her fifth collection of poems.

www.poetrypf.co.uk

Siân Thomas is Poet in Residence for Ashdown Forest. Her work has appeared widely in magazines such as Agenda, The Clearing, Poetry Wales, The Rialto and Swamp, and in the anthologies London Rivers and The Needlewriters. Siân’s pamphlet Ovid’s Echo is also published by Paekakariki Press.

Diana Brodie was born in New Zealand. After graduating with an M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and also obtaining teaching qualifications and experience, she emigrated to the United Kingdom. After two years in London and extensive travels in Europe, she settled in Cambridge, first becoming part of the team working for Joseph Needham, the eminent sinologist and Master of Gonville and Caius College, and later working as administrator for a consultancy specializing in education projects in developing countries. Giotto’s Circle, her first collection, was published by Poetry Salzberg in 2013.

After selling out the first edition, we present a second revised edition with some additional poems.

Ian Dunlop is a writer and former art critic of the Evening Standard. His first book, the prize winning, The Shock of the New, about seven historical exhibitions of modern art, was published in 1972. It was followed by books on Van Gogh, and on the life and art of Edgar Degas (1979). He has also written books and articles on contemporary American and British art and has contributed reviews and art criticism to The Times, Studio International, Apollo, The Times Literary Supplement and The Spectator.

Ian Dunlop was born in Edinburgh and now lives in London.

Hospital Notebook is the latest in the serial publication of Alan Loney’s Notebooks. Earlier books are Sidetracks: Notebooks 1976–1991, (Auckland University Press, 1998); Melbourne Journal: Notebooks 1998–2003, (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016); Crankhandle: Notebooks 2010-2012, (Cordite Books, Melbourne, 2015); Heidegger’s Bicycle, 2015–2017, (Paekakariki Press, 2017).

Anthony Watts has been writing ‘seriously’ for about forty years. He has won prizes in poetry competitions and has had poems published in many magazines and anthologies, including Acumen, Frogmore Papers, The Journal, Obsessed with Pipework, Orbis, The Rialto and Riggwelter. This is his fourth collection. Anthony’s home is in rural Somerset and his main interests poetry, music, walking and binge thinking—activities which he finds can often be happily combined.

India Russell is a widely published poet, her fourth collection being Pattern The Golden Thread (Paekakariki Press, 2014). Virginia McKenna, who has recorded much of India’s poetry, writes, ‘India Russell continues to weave her deep magic, uniquely transporting us into other realms, awakening memories images.’ It was the magic of the natural worlds, visible and invisible, in the work of Friedrich Hölderlin that made India Russell decide to embark on her translation, Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece, which has been called ‘a true poet’s translation.’

India, a Fellow of the Temenos Academy, studied German and Scandinavian at University College London and was Junior Research Fellow in German at King’s College, London. She holds a Speech Drama Licentiate at Guildhall School of Music Drama and trained in Contemporary Dance at The Place. But her ‘real teachers’, she writes, ‘have always been the natural world, visions and dreams, for which, thank goodness, there are no colleges or universities.'

This is a dual language version of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle Poems in the original and in modern English written by Paul McLoughlin

This is the second in the Paekakariki Press Poems in Translation series.

A new collection of poems by two Bulgarian poets: Rumiana Ebert and Tzveta Sofronieva in the original Bulgarian and in English translation. This is the first in the Paekakariki Press Poems in Translation series.

Rumiana Ebert is a writer, translator and chemist. Born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, she moved to Germany in 1966 and gained a PhD in Chemistry from the Technical University in Munich. She also studied Musicology at the University of Heidelberg. She has published four books of poems in German: Entgegenkommen, (Kastell, 1992) and Schnittstellen, (Kastell, 1996); Ecken und Ovale, (Wieser, 2013) and Mitlesebuch 135, (Aphaia, 2017).

  Tzveta Sofronieva is the author of twenty collections of poetry, short stories, essays and translations. Her work also encompasses poetry installations and she has edited several anthologies. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, she now is settled in Berlin and has a PhD in History of Science.

Alex Josephy lives in London and Italy. Her poetry pamphlet Other Blackbirds was published by Cinnamon Press in March 2016. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies in print and online, and have won awards including the McLellan prize 2014 and the Battered Moons prize 2013. She was poet in residence at Rainham Hall, Essex in June 2016, and in Markham Square, London, in 2017.

Silvana Biasutti, originally from Milan, now lives in Sant’Angelo in Colle and is well known for her sensitive drawings of the Val D’Orcia where many of these poems are set. She has made drawings for a wine calendar, L’agenda del Brunello di Montalcino 2012 (Metamorfosi) and an Italian book of days, Un Anno a Montalcino.

Hitchhiking is a slow way to travel. You observe passing cars and invent personalities for their occupants. Then when you least expect it a car will pull up with a driver and perhaps a friend, or a dog, or a family. In the seconds after seeing you they will have come to the decision that reflects a mind-set that accompanies a pace of life: there is little reason not to pick up a hitchhiker.

This collection of poems is dedicated to the lucky inhabitants of New Zealand who made this possible — accompanied by some delightful illustrations by Barbara Macfarlane.

George Szirtes, a child refugee from 1956 Hungary, lives in the UK and published his first book of poems, The Slant Door, in 1979 winning the Faber Prize. He has published many since then, winning the T S Eliot Prize in 2004 for which he has been also twice shortlisted.

He has been awarded various international prizes for his translations of Hungarian poetry and fiction. He has written for children, for the stage and in frequent collaborations with artists and musicians. His most recent book of poetry is Mapping the Delta (Bloodaxe 2016).

Kirsten Schmidt was born in Germany and has lived and worked in London since 1987. She studied metalwork and design at Camberwell College of Art which led her to etching and other methods of printmaking. She has illustrated three other books for Paekakariki Press.

Mark Floyer spent his early childhood in Calcutta between the years 1957-63. He is a widely published poet and Calcutta and India appear in his verse, vividly imagined. His work has appeared in Muse India, The Irish Literary Review, Kavya Bharati, Poetry of the British Underground, The English Chicago Review and several other publications.

  “Finely tuned, yet sometimes fittingly fragmented, these imagistic poems evoke early childhood memories in sensuous, compelling language.”

—Stephanie Norgate, author of Hidden River and The Blue Den.

“Crow Dusk remains with me both for its striking imagery and the co-ordinated music of the English, Bengali and Hindi.”

—Rajat Chaudhuri, author of Hotel Calcutta.

Live Long Enough is No 20 in the New Garland Series of poetry books, now published by Paekakariki Press.

The poems in Live Long Enough are an eclectic sample – of form and influence, style and mood. By turns autobiographical and encomiastic, they record a life of reading and travel. Acknowledging debts to aesthetic ancestors as diverse as Horace, Mascha Kaléko and Clive James, Newman commemorates more idiosyncratic paragons – grandparents, daughters and professors – as well as heroes and heroines of earlier poetry, among them Vergil’s warrior maiden and Schubert’s winter wanderer.

Rafaël Newman was born in Montreal, studied classics and comparative literature in Toronto, Berlin and Princeton, and lives in Zurich. He is the author of The Visible God: Staging the History of Money (UPA) and the editor of Zweifache Eigenheit: Neuere jüdische Literatur in der Schweiz (Limmat), and his scholarly work has appeared, in English and German, in various publications.

Heidegger’s Bicycle is the last in the serial publication of Alan Loney’s Notebooks. The earlier books are Sidetracks: Notebooks 1976–1991, Auckland University Press, 1998; Melbourne Journal :Notebooks 1998–2003, University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016; Crankhandle: Notebooks 2010-2012, Cordite Books, Melbourne, 2015, which won The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, 2016.

Alan Loney’s first book of poems was published in 1971. He was co-winner (poetry) in the New Zealand Book Awards in 1977, Literary Fellow at the University of Auckland in 1992, and Honorary Fellow of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne 2002– 2006. He was awarded The Janet Frame Award for Poetry in 2011. Loney has published 15 books of poetry, and eight books of prose with a recent emphasis on the nature of the book. He has recently retired from handpress printing and now is a full-time writer in Melbourne, Australia.

This book is in the same format as our successful Walthamstow and has poems about London people and places as well as delightful illustrations by Kirsten Schmidt.

Signals on the Railway Land is Patrick Bond’s first published collection. The poems seek to honour, in crafted and energetic words, the natural forms and living presences of his local nature reserve, ‘The Railway Land’, in Lewes, Sussex.

He is a passionate admirer of the poetry of John Clare, and a student of Thomas Traherne. His poem Printing Press No 379 won the Torriano Poetry Competition in 2013 and his poems have appeared in journals like Scintilla and Resurgence, and in anthologies published by the Frogmore Press and the Belgrave Press.

Lil Tudor-Craig is a painter of the natural world currently living and working in Wales. She is known for her work in egg tempera but also has a great love of lino cut and printing.

Ivy Alvarez's poetry features in Poetry Review, The Guardian and Best Australian Poems (2009, 2013), with several poems translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Her previous collections include Disturbance (Seren Books, 2013) and Mortal.

Ivy is a MacDowell and Hawthornden Fellow, twice-nominated for the Pushcart Prize, both Literature Wales and the Australia Council for the Arts awarded her grants towards the writing of Disturbance. www.ivyalvarez.com

A collection of poems incorporating the sell out Homing In which circles moments from a life , some real, some imagined, with resilience and a wry humour. The poet writes in English or Scots as the poems dictate. She has also created eight woodcut illustrations included in this edition.

A collection of short poems by Michael Shann all about Walthamstow. Each poem is set in a particular location in and around the borough. It also has 10 delightful black and white illustrations by Kirsten Schmidt.

A collection of poems by Jill Mylius tracing her connections with London, the place she now calls home.

Jill Mylius studied drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art and after some time living and working in France, taught Art and English at both primary and secondary level in London when she began writing poetry, etching and painting. She later read English Literature at Birkbeck and became involved in the Birkbeck Poetry Workshop.

Setting aside its shop-worn suite of poetic hallmarks—inconstancy, passivity, femininity, duplicity, flux—this sequence of poems stakes out a new symbolic territory for the moon and offers up a new moon for poetry and for our times. Poem by poem, moon by moon, All the Ways You Still Remind Me of the Moon rediscovers what the moon has to tell us about our relationship to change and recurrence, the tug of illusion, the patterns in our actions, the transitory temper of our reflections, and all the many ways in which we wax and wane. The moon, it transpires, is not only there even when we’re not looking at it; it is everywhere we look.

Liane Strauss is a prize-winning poet, the author of Leaving Eden and Frankie, Alfredo, and Head of Poetry in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was born in Queens, New York, and has lived all over the US and now in London—but always in sight of the moon.

Sue Roe’s first book was a novel inspired by works of art including Picasso’s L’Attente, a painting that continues to fascinate her. Since then she has published books on Gwen John, the Impressionist painters; and (in her latest book, In Montmartre), the circle that revolved around Picasso in his early years. The experiences of poring over documents in the Musee Rodin, exploring the villages where the Impressionists lived and wandering the lanes of Montmartre have infused her poetry as well as her biographies, as have the personal experiences which are woven through The Magpie.

Pattern & The Golden Thread is India Russell's fourth collection of poetry; the others being The Kaleidoscope of Time, 2007, The Dance of Life, 2010 and The Lane to Paradise, 2013. Her poetry, published in many journals including Acumen and Agenda, is concerned with spiritual dimensions, particularly with regard to the natural world and man's relation to it.

The latest collection from Chrissie Gittins. The spur for the title poem was the torn and stitched letters from Charlotte Brontë to Professor Heger which are lodged between sheets of glass in the British Library. In their physicality they sit beside poems about a Georgian table decker who worked with ground glass and stained sugar, and the dots and dabs of Stanley Spencer’s painted blooms. But whether it’s the emerald trees of an Indian miniature, or the bonnets and long skirts of a Norwood Pissarro, these poems are conduits for love and loss. A journey is taken without the intended companion, jars of preserves invoke an exiled friend, the absence of wind calls up a landscape. And beyond that there is the cirrus cloud of absurdity.

This anthology is a selection of poems submitted by children and adults in response to two exhibitions at The Mill: ‘Wildlife ReWorked’ - inspirational ‘Urban Beasties’ made from recycled and natural materials, by local families with sculptor Michelle Reader; ‘Waiting’ - 6 enigmatic plaster figures by Esther Neslen, originally made for the 2012, E17 Art Trail, and sited in various public places.

A community project, ‘joined up writing’, co-ordinated and curated by Mo Gallaccio for ArtWorks at The Mill as part of the 2013 festival, Words over Waltham Forest .

Michelangelo can paint an angel William Blake announced, for the Archangel Gabriel had sat next to him and in person told Mr. Blake so. This collection takes inspiration from the legacy of imagination which is the inheritance of all writers.

William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Clare, Emily Dickinson and Ted Hughes are among poets who charge these poems with new departure points as a line of poetry, a portrait, an observation releases the imagination on further journeys. Loss, change and chance are recurring themes but there are moments of unexpected connection and transcendence. Ann Allen started work in publishing. Since her move from London to the Cotswolds she has found time for her own creative writing and this is her first collection of poetry.

A collection of poems by Professor Barbara Hardy of the University of London inspired by Dante's poems, illustrated by Kate Hardy.

This anthology gathers together the poems and artworks displayed in the 2012 Walthamstow Poetry Trail, part of the E17 Art Trail, and poems from the Forest Poets exhibition at the William Morris Gallery inspired by items in the collection.

The Walthamstow Poetry Trail encourages writers and artists of all ages and experience to participate and enjoy poetry and this year, bringing words and images together, poets and artists have collaborated to create poems on the theme of “bestow‘.

Janet El-Rayess began work in the theatre as a stage hand and occasional actor. She lived and worked in Damascus for two and a half years, read English at Birkbeck, and became a member of the Birkbeck Poetry Workshop where she has received invaluable inspiration and criticism. She translates from Italian, writes short stories and novellas, and lives in London and Italy. She has had poems and translations published in The Cork Literary Review, Illuminations, Equinox, The Interpreter's House, and other magazines.

These poems are based upon Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translations in the broadest sense: new versions of some of the myths from Ovid’s poem, itself a collection of older stories. Some myths retold in a contemporary setting; others as variations around the original story and some inspired by but not bearing a close relationship to the original.

Siân Thomas lives in East Sussex and holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing and Authorship from the University of Sussex. Her work has appeared in Agenda, The Daily Telegraph, The Rialto and Swamp, among other publications.

A collection of poems by Darius Victor Snieckus. He was born in Canada in 1967 and lives in England with his wife and two children. His poems have appeared in European, North American and Australian literary journals. He works as an energy journalist.

Michael Shann has been writing poetry for over fifteen years. His poems have appeared in a wide range of poetry magazines and anthologies. Michael has also completed a novel, The Protesters, which draws on his experience of living and working in China.

A sequence of 12 poems chosen and edited by Barbara Hardy, which circles moments from a life - some real, some imagined with resilience and a wry humour.

The poet writes in English or Scots as the poems dictate and she has created 6 relief prints, mainly woodcuts, specially for this limited edition.

This Anthology is a collection of the poems and artworks displayed during the Walthamstow Poetry Trail, part of the E17 Art Trail 2011, an independent, artist led, community focussed project.

Inspired by the themes of Home and Community, poets and artists collaborated to create works to be shown in property display spaces donated by Estate Agents along Hoe Street.

A collection of poems by Michael Baron, Robina Barson, Marianne Burton, Janet El Rayess, Barbara Hardy, Nathan Hardy, Angela Inglis, Alex Maunder, Jill Mylius, Val Pancucci, Sue Roe, Jennifer Tanner, Sian Thomas, Sandy Tozer, Ann Vaughan-Williams, Frances White, Jeremy Worman.