Böcker utgivna av Hedgehog Poetry Press

The Words of Others are All We Have is a poetry conversation between Louise Machen and J. Daniel West illustrating working class landscapes in an era of gentrification and widening social disparity.This collection traverses the topographies of the city and its surrounding suburbs, examining the contradictions that arise in the relationships between people and the places that provide a familiar comfort whilst surreptitiously encouraging a coalescence with the inability to escape economic and emotional deprivation.These poems are rooted in the everyday, in the discord between the metropolis and the natural world, in the importance of our 'root networks' and the realities of class restriction. From terraced streets to high-rise flats and glass monoliths to nostalgic landmarks, this conversation of poetry discusses experiences of childhood, adolescence and aging in the urban sprawl of the north."Set in a vivid landscape of urban decay, a brutal Eden where paradise isn't lost, it was just never an option. These 'conversation' poems rise above their beginnings like a plume: part smoke, part accusation and part defiance and without sentimentality into vital poetry written as a remembrance and as a warning to the rest of the lifestyle obsessed world that we were here and some still are."Jack Caradoc 4/10/23"With relentless "fire and fury", this uncompromising pamphlet of poetry centres on issues of social, economic and cultural deprivation in Manchester. The poems, which highlight poor living standards and the "gritty filth" of environments, also focuses intently on adverse life experiences and lack of opportunities of an underclass and working class struggling at the edge; all the more tragic because of the gentrified communities around these poor estates - the distant "sun-kissed monoliths" of new housing development, which sharply contrast with poverty-stricken neighbourhoods. In focusing on deep inequalities, the two writers in the collaborative work shine an uncomfortable but necessary light on the grime of neglected areas and the insurmountable challenges people born without privilege face in trying to break out of the poverty trap. This no-holes barred account, rendered with sharp poeticism, makes gripping reading."Matthew M. C. Smith, author of The Keeper of Aeonsand editor of Black Bough."The words of others are all we have is an aptly-named pamphlet, as each poem perfectly speaks in conversation with one another in a way that harmonises in a beautiful melody throughout.The pamphlet is a delve into gritty urban settings honeyed with nostalgia but sharpened by hindsight, and we are warmed by personal moments of exploration of both what constitutes as 'home', and the relationships that define and refine us from those places. From synthetic underpass lights to rows of Primarks and John Lewises, there is an acute ache of familiarity, along with the throb of a home altered beyond recognition.These powerful poems will leave the reader bathing in that 'fire and flood' of yesteryears long gone, leaving the inevitable question; where does that now leave us?"Scarlett Ward, author of Ache and Founder of Fawn Press."Urgent, vivid, and important poetry from perspectives that tend to be silenced, grasping, among other things, the entrapments of poverty, and the slipperiness of memory."Dave Haslam, writer, broadcaster and DJ

Watanabe Seitei (¿¿ ¿¿, 1851 - 1918), also known as Watanabe Sh¿tei, was a Japanese Nihonga painter who was one of the first Japanese painters to visit Europe, attending the 1878 International Exhibition in Paris and being awarded a medal. He blended Western realism with the delicate colours and washes of the Kikuchi Y¿sai school, introducing a new approach to kach¿ga (bird-and-flower painting).In late 2023 we challenged poets to create poetry based upon the artwork of Watanabe Seitei, and the poems produced were simply stunning.Poems for Watanabe Seitei is a beautifully produced anthology that is both beautiful and full of beauty, featuring a selection of poetry from 21 poets, alongside some of the work that inspired it.Poetry is included from:Margaret RoyallRhiannon LewisSharron GreenNigel KentSarah O'GradyPatricia M OsborneBrian McManusCarol Lee Saffioti-HughesJohn HeringtonIsabel MilesOz HardwickCeinwen E Cariad HaydonChristine TokunagaSaskia AshbyHazel StarrittGreta RossJackie TrumanMoira GarlandCassia StevensFelice HardyMick Yates

"All of the poems in this collectionwere written in the following nine citieswhen I was just passing throughLondon, Nottingham, Leicester, Cairo, Luxor, New York, Stockholm, Bratislava, Budapest."

Open Letters is a passionate, persuasive collection about finding beauty and meaning in a world that moves faster than us. If we are captured souls with fleeting dreams, then Booth-Jones' poems are living, breathing and reaching through the bars, holding fallen leaves and faded polaroids. The collection fluctuates between liminality and longing, capitalism and contentment, showing defiance by shaping their echoes. At the edge of the sky, drenched in advertisements and sunlight, the moon eats, the wind laughs and Booth-Jones writes letters. We are brighter and more gentle for it.Leonie Rowland, author of In Bed with Melon Bread Readers will find themselves lost in the intense observations of a world both 'impossible and real' in this series of missive-poems slowly unfurling through each line. Often transcendent, sometimes wry, always soulful and beautiful, this series of letters addresses hypothetical lovers, the city and the self, amongst others-delivering a sequence which is rich, profound, personal and completely addictive. Vic Pickup, author of Lost & Found It is not easy to follow a successful first collection but with Open Letters to the Sky, Booth-Jones does it with aplomb.Niall M Oliver, author of My Boss

"Many years ago a friend bought me a jardinière and ever since then it has graced our windowsill, and as each flower I collect from the garden fades I drop in the spilled dried petals. This vessel is now brimful with the gatherings of spring, summer, autumn, winter, my children, friends past and present, the landscape I have always lived in and love. I hope that when you turn these pages you feel the changing seasons, northern air on your skin and find pleasure in the moments that have meant so much to me." - Kerry Darbishire"I am a big fan of Kerry Darbishire's delicate nature poems and knew this collection would be a treat. As soon as you open it you can smell the Lake District, so skilfully is it evoked by these beautifully crafted poems tracing the four seasons and with them the phases of a life. Here is a poet who can ambush you when you least expect it with a startling insight, a new and original phrase which is somehow just right, 'knife-edged, precious'. It is indeed (and this will stay with me) 'a thing to leave your soil'. A really special collection."- Carole Bromley"An absolute treat. Within a backdrop of the four seasons, Darbishire weaves personal history and close observation of nature into a luminous web - the everyday and the extraordinary shimmer with light. Her sense of place, of belonging, is key - the 'here and now' being interspersed by poems that capture the essence of other times, of peoples that have come before. Magical."- Joy Howard"A beauty of a book. Kerry Darbishire has created such rich, crafted poems completely dedicated to life and the world around them."- Niall Campbell

"Hélène Demetriades' The Plumb Line is a magnificent, soaring testament to the tenacity of the human spirit. These are powerful, visionary poems, attentive to the body and the dark and tender places of the soul. They probe our closest human relationships, and are both raw to harm, and deeply compassionate. By the end of The Plumb Line I found myself inspired and consoled by the human capacity for love, which is something beyond forgiveness, and by the power of poetry to interrogate, transcend and transform."- Fiona Benson"In these poems, the things of this world-'Persian rugs on parquet floors', 'a trough full of tadpoles', 'a gush-rock stream'-are imbued with an other-worldly richness. At the same time, the poems struggle and are grounded in the ordeals of childhood and growing up. The reader dips into this rich world with awe and wonder, 'dangling our legs', with the speaker of these poems, 'in eternity'."- Eve Grubin"Hélène Demetriades' courageous, gendered poems in The Plumb Line question how women are seen and not seen. Love and compassion float above a powerful undertow of violence and unease."- Katrina Naomi"This is no fairy tale, the ogre is an only too real father, the pages 'filled with his bounty and tyranny'. The fragility of childhood is laid bare in powerful poems that spare nothing in their startling physicality. A daughter performs a kind of alchemy and remarkably a love 'scented with lavender buds' survives the stoniest of grounds."- Martin Figura

Brought together for the first time, these are poems about ancestry and addiction, about landscape and introspection, about walking in the natural world and reflecting on our own inner mindscapes. Sometimes meditative, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, they range from industrial Scotland to rural Cumbria and across the North Atlantic, taking the reader through geological and human concepts of time right up to the present moment.'I loved how accessible, they are, and how true. So much goes on beneath their shimmering surfaces. From a shell-littered west coast beach to overheard stories on a Kincardine bus, Carol McKay's poetry is vividly and poignantly in touch with the things that matter - family, community, a sense of place and of history. These big-hearted, keen-eyed poems understand just how precarious life can be, and how thrilling.'Chris Powici, author of This Weight of Light: poems, Red Squirrel Press, 2015.'Craft without ever seeming in any way laboured, tight but not overwrought. I love Carol's use of the short line; the images she finds right outside her door and on long walks.'Donal McLaughlin, author of beheading the virgin mary and other stories, Dalkey Archive.

These poems look at the life of a GP from a doctor's point of view.They include a sequence of poems seen through the lens of the doctor described in John Berger's book 'A Fortunate Man' and from the author's own experiences from medical student to family doctor."Judith Wozniak's many years of empathetic observation as a GP provide the lens through which she views John Berger's seminal work describing the life of a country doctor. Add to that her considerable skill as a poet in shaping this moving narrative into a formal sonnet sequence - creating a heroic crown for a heroic man. Elsewhere in this debut pamphlet, she relates her own experiences in medical practice in poems that are vital and compassionate, but never sentimental. The power of her work is to show us ourselves at our most vulnerable, but to find in those moments something redemptive and hopeful. "- Tamar Yoseloff "Judith Wozniak skilfully portrays the working life of a doctor, and how that life operates outside the hospital and its consulting rooms. In these poems we are taken deep within the community and inside patients' homes. What the doctor witnesses can be harrowing. A woman tries to escape domestic violence; a vulnerable child navigates a day in school 'clinging to loose scuffed shoes with your toes'; family members are pushed to their limits caring for relatives, but there is life-affirming stuff here too. True bonds are formed between doctor and patient, as 'secrets and fears' are disclosed. The doctor may watch 'from the edge of things' but will, without question, put the patient first and continue to 'think of them in the quiet of the night.' "- Rebecca Goss

Carbon is a collection about life in all its smallest details and largest concerns. It spans from positive across negative to the more neutral moments in life. It is a group of poems aimed at making us stop and feel and lastly celebrate the beauty all around."An intimate yet sweeping collection from a startling new voice on the scene- from ephemeral landscapes to insightful recollection, these poems will resonate with you long after the last page"- Susan Ireland Author of Sight Unseen"Kelly's poems practically sing "like prayer cushions intricately / woven with patterns of / the past". They are filled with moments exquisite delicacy and a freshness so needed in the hubbub of everyday life. Memories of grandmothers, sewing with mother, sunny picnics and picked periwinkles tied up with love and laughter - this is a book we all need after 2020!"- Haley Jenkins Editor Selcouth Station Press"This exquisitely-crafted poetry collection is an extraordinary combination of delicacy and strength. In it Elisabeth explores the building blocks of our lives (nature, hope, family, love) with a fresh honesty that makes for a moving and utterly beautiful book."- Charlotte Oliver, Poet

The poems in Ticking deep map a beautiful but apparently empty strip of the South Wales coastline that looks across the Bristol Channel to Exmoor. The collection could be classified as nature writing, though the term, deep-mapping is a more accurate description of the eclectic subject matter: there are ghosts, suicides and ruins, as well as dung spiders, stone masons and insect apprehension. Many of the poems focus on the history and geography, archaeology and wild life of a two-mile stretch of the Welsh coastline. However, the mapping in Ticking is not only confined to the tangible or material, it includes the intangible, the dreams and hopes, imaginations and fears of its residents both in the past and in the present."Quietly, precisely, these poems stitch together several kinds of journey, though the seasons, through convalescence and a spirited response to one's own ageing, through an intimately known locality, till the life of a person is linked with that of a place. Step by step, grounded in observation of the natural world, given lift by a delightful humour, they move from the confines of the house out through fields underlaid by history to the dizzying edge of the land and of geological time."Philip Gross"Ticking is a quietly stunning collection. You read the poems with a growing sense of excitement which turns to a feeling of eerie glee. The sense of a poet finding her voice and vision is palpable. A small quadrant of the Welsh coast is deeply observed and felt and excavated, its histories, dramas and secrets brought to light. Everything here seems to live, thrillingly and awfully, at once. The girl in the woman, the body in the cliff, the appetites and angers of the sea, time caught in a child's question, the spectre of death at a wedding; here are the patterns of mortality in bent grasses, in the imprint of a bird on a window, in the wheeling of a moment, a day, a season. Wales has made another poet: her name is Ellie Rees.'"Horatio Clare"A beautifully crafted and immediately engaging poetry collection based around the notion of a 'deep mapping'...There is also a sense of close observations, of objects and creatures wriggling free from metaphor, existing for their own sake. The pieces are full of lovely close observation of birds, insects and flowers, things which don't stand for something but are something...The poems themselves are immediately apprehensible and emotionally direct, although not without a rueful wit or sudden reversals of tone. Indeed the mood of the poetry constantly shifts like impressionistic light, but for all that, the feelings are rarely uncertain or ambiguous."Dr. Alan Bilton

Maureen and Patricia grew up hundreds of miles from each other in different countries of the UK but share common experiences of childhood in the fifties and sixties when ice laced the inside of bedroom windows and corporal punishment was common in schools. They survived to become brides, mothers, career women and technophobes. Sometimes joyous, sometimes painful, these poems are a conversation about love, hope and identity.Sherry & Sparkly is a Poetry Conversation between two fantastic poets - one you really want to listen in to.