Böcker utgivna av Knives Forks and Spoons

3 Entertainments brings together three works for film and television by the American poet Weldon Kees, whose work was introduced to the United Kingdom by Michael Hofmann and Simon Armitage in the 1990s and published by Faber & Faber. A champion of film noir and B-pictures, Kees collaborated on two screen stories in the early 1950s, 'Assignment to Peril, ' a Cold War thriller set in Istanbul, and 'Gadabout, ' which hints darkly of the CIA's LSD doping project, MKUltra. The latter, which is only a fragment, also includes a transcript of a tape on which Kees brainstorms the plot and characters. 'The Waiting Room, ' a stage play adapted for television, is likely Kees's last work before he disappeared from the Golden Gate Bridge in July 1955. With an introduction and notes by Kees's biographer, James Reidel, 3 Entertainments fills a void in Kees's opus and reveals his 'third way' of reconciling a life of art in the inhospitable and desolate culture of postwar America.Besides these moving poems, Weldon Kees left behind an excellent play of the type now most successful off-Broadway, called 'The Waiting Room.' I hope his heirs will make it available soon. Like his poems, it was a few years too early.-Kenneth Rexroth

' ... This powerful book is well worth the money not only for its unassuming psychological insights but for the exquisite sensual images that pervade, all of which are startlingly English. Don't be deterred by the subject matter, this is not a squeamish book; it is a book that explores our values of life and it is a book about endurance and beauty. About 60 pages long, its unshrinking, forthright style make it quite quick to read (I didn't want to put it down) but the images therein linger long after the turning of each page. Pieces should not be left sitting on any publisher's shelf; it should be dog-eared and passed on.' - Carol Thistlethwaite: Tregolwyn Book Reviews Rip Bulkeley said - of some of those already published, in this case in the River King Poetry Supplement (USA) - ' ... suddenly I ran into something not just good but great, a poem which I hope has already gone round the world but if not should do so as soon as possible. It is Sam Smith's PIECES, an exhibition of 21st-century war via the small-town concentration camp ... ' - NHI Online Review ' ... a captivating exploration of love, grief, and especially hope in a prisoner of war camp ... But Pieces is also about violence, and therein lies something fascinating and even beautiful ... The lines are musical, lulling ... creates an enchanted, awful place where people are dying, where we don't want them to stop dying, so we can keep reading ... ' - Donna Biffar: Orbis #121 ' ... one of the best books to have appeared in [the] UK so far this century ... ' - Jeremy Hilton: Fire #19 ' ... The descriptive density and personal revelation of the experience give these 'pieces' poetic weight ... Smith has a winning style ... ' - The Black Mountain Review #6 ' ... Smith's language has an abstract and untethered feel, but his descriptions of the natural cycle of life continuing beyond and without reference to the prisoners are compellingly precise ... ' - L. Kiew: NHI Online Review ' ... prose-poetry items which stand alone, or as a landscape of observations ... This is a new approach; you need to read it yourself.' - Geoff Stevens: Purple Patch #101

Something of the spirit of Virgil's poem has been transposed to southern England in1959. All of the major and most of the minor events and characters are here, the events refracted through modernity or new narratives, the characters thinly disguised (Laocoön is Loud Colin; the harpies are Mrs Harpic; Pallas is Patsy), and the relocations easy to spot (Troy is in Richmond; Carthage is a village in Wiltshire; the games are in Weymouth; the nascent Rome is Bristol). But readers need to know nothing of The Aeneid (or even to have heard of it) to enjoy this freewheeling, humorous, and socially reflective verse novel. In an addendum, Virgil's founding myth of the Roman Empire becomes the founding myth of the digital world.

A deeply authentic collection of poems, offering moments of rare beauty. It''s always brave to speak openly about depression. It''s even more courageous to shape and craft a public work from this most sacred experience. With stunning tenderness and exquisite language, Owen exposes a world of hidden truths. Ones many of us can relate to and understand. An absolute must read for all concerned with the human condition, and the power of words to transform.- Helen Calcutt This new collection by Antony Owen is commendable for its risk-taking themes and does not shy away from taboo subjects. Owen takes the reader with him right to the edge, and then over it, through the personal to the universal and then even further, to the point of collective defenestration. As he says himself ''life is too precious to be timid''. This timely collection shines a spotlight on suicide, autistic related depression, and those soul-destroying alpha attitudes like ''man up'', that prevail in the workplace and beyond. These poems demand attention, seek recognition, plead for intervention, and beg for release. It is an unsettling, yet immersive work, that growls through its teeth. This straight-talking, no holds barred, narrative resonates well beyond the page, exposing a fiercely, tenacious tenderness beneath.- Chaucer Cameron  Owen''s work is vitally important now more than ever. A true and remarkable writer who wears his heart like the Coventry City crest.- Jamie Thrasivoulou 

David Miller's work is consistently surprising in its seemingly effortless ability to combine the abstract and philosophical with closely-focussed details and the specifics of the confused and confusing lives we lead. He is one of the few writers I know who can navigate the spiritual, everyday obsessions and asides, along with the confessional in this manner, luring us in with godly absence and literary echoes. It is astonishing and accomplished writing.- Rupert LoydellPure and beautiful poetry! - Liliane LijnThe poems in Some Other Shadows are deceptively simple. Repetitions and inversions tie the poems together, but they also point up paradox, and the way words wobble in their meanings, especially as we approach the spiritual and moral dimensions of language. And then there are those incremental shifts along the way, time and reading meaning we can't turn back. David Miller is an honest and skilful poet, one of our best. - Keith JebbSome Other Shadows is a mysterious, compelling work, like a nightwalk through a city filled with unforgettable architecture. Miller takes us to the 'strange places' where the music of language swirls over our heads, asking to be breathed-in and re-spoken. In tightly-woven syllabics Miller pulls us into a world where poets and musicians give voice to the in-between places - and nothing is as it first seems. - Chris McCabe

Footnotes from History: the Debord Variations is based on a late essay by Guy Debord in which he revises and extends some of the ideas he developed in his seminal treatise 'The Society of the Spectacle'. In a series of poetic fragments and quotations Campbell Robinson improvises with Debord's themes as revealed in the footnotes to this essay. Political assassination and word death; the revolution of the everyday and the failure to realise the utopian dreams of the 60s; the breakdown of solidarity and the threat of terrorisms in people's daily lives are among the subjects Campbell Robinson touches upon. However, at no point does the piece become proscriptive or didactic, maintaining throughout the possibility of 'both/and' rather than 'either/or'.Footnotes follows on from Campbell Robinson's earlier texts collected in Blue Solitude, also issued by Knives Forks Spoons Press, by employing a combination of non-illustrative photos taken by the author and a calligraphic text layout. In this respect the text reflects the montage techniques employed by Guy Debord in his seven groundbreaking films made between 1952 and 1994.

"There's a jolting frankness to these poems. Sometimes oddly bare and powerful, they say what they mean." - Mark Waldron "Penny Sharman's poems have a painter's touch, not just in terms of colour, form and light as invocation but in the care with which she picks words and feels her way through them to offer magical experiences that feel fresh and precise." - George Szirtes "Penny Sharman believes in beauty. She believes in a world where "cabbage white flies low / over the singing river," "Dragon lines at Culbone," and a world where "we are canopy adrift, clouds of happy happy-happy." She's a poet who believes there's a "green door / oasis in a burnt out mind" of this century, this crisis where we all find ourselves. So, perhaps it is a blessing that there are still people like Penny Sharman, telling us that "magical plant / mistletoe / needs a / kiss" - maybe if more people thought that way, our world would be kinder. - Ilya Kaminsky"Penny Sharman writes with passion and intensity, painting the world in luminous colours. For her, the meaning is somewhere within the microcosms that make up this universe - the snowflake, the insect, the hair standing up on your skin. In many of her poems she celebrates the unexpectedpleasures of the ageing body, suggesting that the years bring, not exactly wisdom, but a shamelesscuriosity that knows it can never be fully satisfied." - Ailsa Cox

In The Geometric Kingdom Rupert Loydell and Maria Stadnicka write about loss, grief and mourning and explore how memory, faith and ritual facilitate ongoing relationships between the living and the dead. 'Loydell is mining themes that resonate with our times, leading to collaborations with a talented array of fellow poets, allowing for a synergistic pulse of varied views. He and his fellow travelers ask difficult questions and offer open-ended answers through the time-tested holy triad of ethos, logos, and pathos.' - Joey Madia, X-Peri'Stadnicka's poetics is one of craftmanship, wherein she carefully walks the tightrope of surreal poetic metaphor and the gritty realism of investigative journalism and broadcasting. Drawing on her experiences in both, Stadnicka's writing culminates into a distinctly inventive literary landscape.' - Bryony Hughes, Stride

If Roy Fisher famously said 'Birmingham's what I think with', Cliff Yates would probably say 'Birmingham's who I eat with'. These lucid and nimble poems effortlessly thread in and out of the quotidian, always alert to the transformative power of the everyday seen clearly. History is here too, but faced lightly, alongside tributes to key influences like Fisher, O'Hara, Raworth, Sheppard. Yates's art is a fully embodied one (look out for the hilarious Tai Chi Sprout Stalk Form!) which moves - exuding a wry, wise vitality entirely his own.- Scott Thurston

Kianush collected and published his poems for children and young adults in eight books, all of which won different awards. He became known as the founder of children's poetry in Iran. But he does not care for this title which he believes to be quite contrary to his real achievement as the messenger of the truth hidden in the heart of perceptible realities which, in occasional blessed moments, reveals itself to him on the horizon of artistic beauty. He says that in Iran, a country where the people, especially the intelligentsia, have since the late nineteenth century been possessed by the politics of freedom and social change, the popularity of a poet depends on his being the artistic mouthpiece and interpreter of the political aspirations of the populace. On the other hand a poet like himself, one of the few poets who have not sacrificed the universal principles of the art of poetry for the pleasure of temporal popularity, is considered difficult, obscure, elitist, philosophical, idealist, and so forth.Poetry for Mahmud Kianush is the language of the childhood of historical man. He believes that the first human beings began to understand themselves, the world around them and the mysteries of the universe by their poetical interpretations of everything they saw and felt, and this is what real poets have always done and will always do. He agrees with the ancient idea that "man is a political animal," but he adds that man must remain faithful to his primordial nature and first be a poet. 

"What a drag it is getting old" was one of the few things that Belmont Thom and his wife Tuppence agreed on. With a nod to Sophocles and to Homer and with a great big genuflecting thanks-for-the-idea to the late Peter Tinniswood (who appears in the piece) Stroll On tells this couple's story. The narrative is a hybrid of two kinds: 'poem-prose' (as opposed to a prose poem) and magic-realism. 'By turns funny, brilliant, sharp, savage, and surprising, this novella in poem-prose is compulsively readable and intellectually sustaining, as well as being a terrific feat of imagination and linguistic legerdemain. In Stroll On James Russell has invented the perfect form for his good-humouredly caustic outlook on things. All human life is there. Even Alma Cogan'. - Ian Patterson'I devoured Stroll On with relish (and a side order of quadrupley-fried sweet potatoes). It's very clever and very funny (Neither/Do orgasms last long but they remain popular). Everyone who's worth it should read it'. - Andy Mayer'All this and his eye for telling details make James Russell a true story teller and a true poet'. - Lee Harwood