Category Archives: books

WINDSUCKERS & ONSETTERS: SONNOTS for Griffiths

Now available from Materials:

WINDSUCKERS & ONSETTERS: SONNOTS for Griffiths
by Manson and Mendoza

WINDSUCKERS & ONSETTERS: SONNOTS for Griffiths

Blue card covers, 48 pages, side-stapled. £5 inc p&p in UK (£6 Europe, £10 ROW).

WINDSUCKERS & ONSETTERS: SONNOTS for Griffiths is a collaborative project between Peter Manson & Mendoza in commemoration of Bill Griffiths (August 20, 1948 – September 13, 2007). The assemblage of ‘niners’ (nine sets of nine lines with nine syllables per line) uses, or responds to, text found in Fishing and Folk: Life and Dialect on the North Sea Coast (2008) & Pitmatic: Talk of the North East Coal Field (2007) compiled by Bill Griffiths.

Bill Griffiths was born in Middlesex and settled in Seaham, Co. Durham. Mendoza was born in Northumberland and settled in London. Peter Manson was born in Glasgow and settled in Glasgow.


You lose your light.    spend all of your lives.

“endless doubtlessness,   land-full  /   surprised-

ness”.     unintelligible  language.

            eye-acute.    “look at the sun rising…

unspeaking and becoming”      light-like

sun-froth   unGod.      sun-needle   gaze-blaze

                                    erase death,   and in-turn re-birth.     this

                                    land is gold.   this coal is gold.   this clan-

                   ship      of miners              is gold                   is gold       is

 

Many thanks to David Grundy and Lisa Jeschke.

Poem and translations in MOTE 1

There are four of my translations from Mallarmé (“…Mysticis umbraculis”, “Sonnet to Valère Gille”, “Macabre gallantry” and “The prodigal son”), a poem translated from Verlaine (“Hour of the shepherd”) and an untitled poem by me in MOTE 1, ed. Dominic Hale, Maria Sledmere and Ryan Edwards (Edinburgh, July 2018).  Many thanks to the editors.

MOTE 1

Free Poetry Scotland Anthology

I’ve edited a pamphlet anthology of current Scottish poetry for Martin Corless-Smith’s FREE POETRY imprint in Boise, Idaho.  The poets included are Dorothy Alexander, Christina Chalmers, Calum Gardner, Katy Hastie, Colin Herd, MacGillivray, nick-e melville, Iain Morrison, Nisha Ramayya and Kathrine Sowerby.  The publisher encourages the reproduction of this chapbook and its free distribution, ad infinitum.

Here are electronic copies of the anthology files:

Free Poetry Scotland Anthology (458k pdf) [edited 26 March: some formatting improved]

Free Poetry Scotland Cover (52k pdf)  [edited 15 March: the cover link should work now!]

Thanks to Martin, and to Colin Johnson and Tessy Ward for their work on the anthology.

 

New from Free Poetry in Boise: “The Marrying of Hérodiade” by Stéphane Mallarmé

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New from Free Poetry in Boise, Idaho: a selection of scenes and fragments from the unfinished mystery play “Les noces d’Hérodiade” by Stéphane Mallarmé.  31pp A5.  All booklets in the Free Poetry series are issued free of charge and without copyright, and the editor encourages the reproduction of this chapbook and its free distribution ad infinitum.

I’ve run out of copies from the batch I took home from Idaho, but will post here soon with details of how to obtain the booklet in UK/Europe.  Enquiries in North America and elsewhere should be sent to Martin Corless-Smith, mcsmith {at} boisestate {d0t} edu

Many thanks to Martin, and to Colin Johnson for the great (and difficult) typesetting job.