Böcker utgivna av Knives Forks and Spoons

This is a sequence of what I retrospectively regard as 'countersonnets', and they are composed from overheard and gathered material. They derive their shape from the floorplan of the Hergest Unit in Bangor, Gwynedd. The Hergest Unit consists of 3 octagonal buildings that are named after the poets Taliesin, Cynan and Aneurin. A number of my friends have been temporarily housed at this department of Ysbyty Gwynedd Hospital over the years.The Red Book of Hergest, which provides much of the material for this book, is a Middle Welsh text scribed by Hywel Fychan and others in the fourteenth century. It contains seminal Welsh works of literature, including 'The Mabinogion' and the poetry of 'Y Cynfeirdd' and 'Y Gogynferidd'.

Taking only the sonnets Wyatt 'translated' from Petrarch, but adding a few of his own, Robert Sheppard merges the historical Wyatt with his hysterical contemporary analogue, a reluctant civil servant of a corrupt administration. His world fluxes between Henrician terror, administered by Cromwell, and something like our own reality. These sonnets are from a larger grouping called The English Strain.

Situationist poetry

"Ruth Stacey's How to Wear Grunge eschews nostalgia and the self-fulfilling mythology of rock's nearly-famous excesses for a fierce, feminist holler back into the feedback of another place and time, in all its bleached and sticky-carpeted illusions and almost-glory. Between truth or dare narratives that toy with the tension of hard facts - "Too gloomy, tell me about the prettiness again. / No. Tell me the worst thing" - these poems are wild and wise, and faultlessly written. There is a beating rock' n' roll heart of riot-grrl rebellion in every line. Stacey is a fearless and utterly compelling writer, whose candid, courageous poetry takes on the prevailing narrative and places women at the very epicentre." - Jane Commane "In How to Wear Grunge, Ruth Stacey has achieved a bittersweet examination of brutal youth and violent love, with expert attention to the timing of acceptance, obsession and revelation. There's almost a contact-high to these poems, an intoxication that has been carefully crafted to provide relief from the horrors of the past and of each other, creating a deceptively fragile romance of a sub-culture that encouraged the dirt and distortion of the fragmented self. However, once we have questioned the lives of the damaged, haunted souls in this cool as hell collection, what burns through is strength and survival, wounds that gush with the language of dark joy, the sweet stink of dope and incense, a promise (to past, present and future selves) tightly rolled into a joint so full of flavour it will leave your mouth watering. How to Wear Grunge is ultimately a kaleidoscopic questionnaire. There are no right or wrong answers. In the end, we all dance to something. We make noise, we hurt each other and, sometimes, we forgive." - Bobby Parker

James Russell, an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Cambridge, has been studying psychology for 50 years. In this autobiographical book he reflects on where psychology fails (and succeeds).

Intimately moving over and returning to a valley and fields to the south of Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, Red Bank raises and interleaves versions of history and experience, amongst them that of a teenager in a school for young offenders in the late 1960s and the battle of Winwick Pass, 19 August 1648. Red bank stands in a nexus of vision: between the costly, oblivious masquerades of Charles 1 and his execution, between the psychedelia of the Beatles and the desire by generations of teachers to help the children in their care, amongst them Mary Bell. The music of the three sections is initiated by memories of 'Penny Lane', 'Get Back' and 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' respectively, and the poem's progress as dream-like as the coincidence of the Beatles' last rooftop concert with the simultaneous laying of flowers by crowds on the site of the Stuart king's execution.