Spout Poetry

books:

Dianne Darby: Perfect Legs
(poems and stories 44pp perfect bound £4) "It's a really great book....I do admire the sense of necessity behind the poems, their intensity....such a good ear and eye for all the details." Lee Harwood
Published 1995. ISBN 1 899114 05 X

John Duffy: Perpetual Light
Limpid meditations on stone and water, fierce social satires, passionate elegies and love poems, united by a clarity of voice, whether speaking Scots or English.
Published 1998. ISBN 1 899114 41 6

Ralph Hancock: Hermit Space
(72pp perfect bound £6.00) is a labyrinth of a book, exploring the nature of sight and insight, of inner and outer space. Through a series of poems intermingled with prose meditations, Ralph Hancock travels the caves of our prehistory in search of the genetic thread that links artists such as those who worked at Lascaux to today's painters and visionaries. Packed with strange facts and surprising connections, Hermit Space is also a passionate, loving testimony to the characters in Ralph's personal history, his ancestors as well as his own family. The book works on many layers, combining history, myth, science and experience, to create a moving and tender statement of faith in fallible humanity.
Published 2001. ISBN 1 899114 71 8

Steve Littlejohn: The Chrysalis Machine
(3 long poems 56pp perfect bound £4) "...deserves respect for a willingness to risk the wider exploration of our dilemmas so many poets fear to dare." Steve Sneyd in 10th Muse. Nominated for a Rhysling Award in the USA.
Published 1995. ISBN 1 899114 06 8

Mark Murphy: Tin Cat Alley
(48pp perfect bound £4) "Crossing from Paris to Russia, from Osip Mandelstam to Pablo Picasso, Murphy takes us on journeys of the mind which enrich and challenge us." Polly Bird in Poetry Quarterly Review.
Published 1996. ISBN 1 899114 16 5

Eleanor Rees: Feeding Fire
(pp perfect bound £5.00) Eleanor Rees writes poems that you might expect Harrison Birtwhistle to set to music. Her Feeding Fire has a delicate, off-kilter feel that can suddenly flame into a passionate declaration or a piercing insight. These are poems commited to the here and now that reveal it to be a dense, haunted place, full of unsolved memories and unrequited desires. Eleanor Rees is above all a lyrical poet, connecting ideas through an intuitive music. Her work deals with the emotions and forces that fuel reality, in poems that make a kind of complex, graceful balancing act out of instinct and bewilderment.
Eleanor received an Eric Gregory Award for
Feeding Fire in 2002.
Published 2001. ISBN 1 899114 75 0

Stuart Rushworth: A Little Book of Leaving
(48pp perfect bound £4) "...the images rub together in a way that glows. Real promise." Vic Allen in Artscene
Published 1995. ISBN 1 899114 15 7

Michael Wilkinson: Dancing Fish
(40pp perfect bound £4) "Supple narrative combines with exciting imagery.... Spout Publications has done well to introduce this new talent." Stella Stocker in Orbis.
Published 1996. ISBN 1 899114 11 4

pamphlets:

John Bosley: You What?
(36pp saddle stitched £2.50) "Reading this book is like drinking a plain glass of water after a heavy meal; refreshing." Steven Waling in The North
Published 1994. ISBN 1 899114 00 9. Out of print.

Louise Cole: Jewelled Tree
(32pp saddle stitched £3.50) is a series of 25 intense, lyrical and passionate confrontations with death and grief, more like a journey than a book, but a journey which finds peace and resolution at its close. These poems are naked, honest reflections of the experience of bereavement, written with a direct force and clarity.
Published 2000. ISBN 1 899114 61 0

Robert Furze: Keep Walking
(28pp saddle stitched £3.50) is a single long meditation on water towers in the Doncaster area, and while Robert's poem acknowledges the absurd aspect of this, it nevertheless manages to enter a strange, post-industrial world where these enigmatic, ignored objects on the edge of everything take on a mysterious significance. This is an adventurous poem, playful and sophisticated, that discovers the lyrical ground beneath the everyday landscape.
Published 2000. ISBN 1 899114 70 X

Carrie Hanson: Bang
(32pp saddle stitched £2.50) Strange and beautiful intimacies, disturbing and absurd events combine in a naked, simple language that pushes against taboo and truth to make dangerous folk music.
Published 1997. ISBN 1 899114 26 2

Keith Jafrate: some anger
(24pp stapled £1.50)
Partisan poems confronting a world where bureaucracies seem to be more important than people.
Published 1998. Out of print.

Milner Place: Piltdown Man and Batwoman
(2 long poems 24pp saddle stitched £2.50) "...weird, rich and earthy....nailed down by numerous tangible peoples, creatures, landscapes and furnishings, enough to make this voyage a fascinating one....rich and distinctive." The Wide Skirt.
Published 1994. ISBN 1 899114 01 7

Milner Place: The City of Flowers
(long poem with b/w illustrations.
A4 portrait format 28pp saddle stitched £4.00) A poem of journeys, into and away from a single place: the barrio of San Pedro in the Spanish city of Cordoba. A rich, satirical, mysterious meditation, enhanced by a series of magical, graceful images by David Pitt.
Published 1998. ISBN 1 899114 45 9

Miriam Scott: Going to the Island
(32pp saddle stitched £3.50) is a series of 22 poems meditating upon Bardsey Island, off the coast of North Wales, which encompasses many other islands along the way. "Spiritual poise, clarity of language and precise imagery take in history, geography, tragedy and hard life, but these poems move beyond being records of events to becoming events in themselves, the achievement of a true poet." Ian Duhig
Published 2000. ISBN 1 899114 65 3

Susannah White: Shall I?
(36pp saddle stitched £2.50) "...impressive in the maturity and cohesion....a wry and honest look at women's lives." Polly Bird in Poetry Quarterly Review.
Published 1996. ISBN 1 899114 20 3

duos:
2 handsewn pamphlets each containing a single poem in a custom-designed envelope.

duo 1 £1.75
Joyce Thornton: Enlightenment
Keith Jafrate: 21 Lines
8pp & 4pp
Published 1996.

duo 2 £3.50
Jack Hirschman: The Grit Arcane
with illustrations by Agneta Falk
Keith Jafrate: Birdsong
with illustrations by David Pitt
both 12pp
Published 1997. ISBN 1 899114 35 1

Spout Fiction

Various authors: A Journey
(fiction, autofiction & poetry with b/w collage illustrations 102pp perfect bound £5) contains work by 16 writers, among them Dianne Darby, Catherine Davidson, Agneta Falk, Roy Fisher, Jeff Nuttall and Tom Pickard. This book is a joint exploration of the things that make us who we are, an experiment with the shared experience of childhood, place, dream and maturity.
Published 1997. ISBN 1 899114 25 4

Matt Black: Plot 161
(64pp perfect bound £6.00) This novella is a wild, mad, beautiful urban tragi-comedy written in a form somewhere between fiction, prose-poetry and free verse, all happening in and around the allotment of the title, with visits to Cabbage World and Safeway thrown in, as well as a superb evocation of the 2000 eclipse. "Here is a writer who uses words like a gardener plants flowers. Matt Black writes of the complicated, sensual, higgledy-piggledy world of allotments, vegetables and sex with an incredible eye for detail. We are lured into a world that is so real you can taste it! This is a wonderful, original read, full of rare delicacies and beauties, combined with a sense of earth and reality." Julia Darling
With specially commissioned woodcuts from Leora Brook
Published in 2001. ISBN 1 899114 76 9

Mary Males: found objects
(48 pages perfect bound £6.00) This book doesn't really fall into any category, but might be called an artist's book, in that it contains a series of 30 of Mary's unclassifiable writings which she has surrounded with an abstract visual narrative. These pieces could be prose poems, or they could be very short stories, or they could be compressed essays, or they could be all or none of these. Whatever they are, they show a deftness and tenderness that is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's short fiction, but with a very English eye for the absurd and unexplainable
Published 2000. ISBN 1 899114 66 1

Scott Murfin: researching oblivion
(112pp perfect bound in a pocket book format £4.00) Stories that discover the ordinary madness and extraordinary passion held under normal life. Absurd, extreme, hilarious and optimistic, affirming a kind of anarchistic loyalty to a life refusing numbness, written in an original, emotionally open style like no other writer’s, these are stories of the life-force surviving secretly among retail malls in midnight rain.
Published 1998. ISBN 1 899114 46 7

Sarah Murphy: die tinkerbell die
winner of the 2003 Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Fiction at the Alberta Book Awards
(84pp perfect bound £7)
In her first book published in Britain, Sarah Murphy explores the dangerous borderline between truth and fiction, memory and invention, to find a way of telling that can do justice to the enormity of everyday life. these writings are also scripts for performance, and they carry the urgency of a secret revealed for the first time. Consisting of 9 linked stories, interleaved with Sarah's strange, compelling images created especially for the book, die tinkerbell die is an exceptional collection, unlike any fiction currently published in Britain.

Sarah Murphy spins her tales of the tragedies of everyday life the way Bob Dylan used to write songs. In her beguiling, savage and sometimes witty style, she prods her readers to look into worlds they prefer to ignore.
The Ottawa Citizen

...written so close to the bone you can hear the scraping. The Saskatoon Star Phoenix
Published 2002. ISBN 1 899114 80 7

Janine Peat: Councillor Ken Hardwick Drive
(56pp perfect bound in a pocket book format £4) A series of tragi-comic monologues paint a picture of what normal life has become, where the absurdities of suburbia encounter the imperatives of age and death. Sweet, strange, funny and disconcerting, a kind of realist soap-opera full of distinctive voices.
Published 1997. ISBN 1 899114 40 8

Karl Spracklen: Green Flavoured Gobstoppers and Aliens
(84pp perfect bound in a pocket book format £4) A tale of rugby league, alien invasion, magic and confectionery, and full of hilarious dialect, Karl Spracklen's ripping yarn follows Arthur Goldthorpe in his attempt to save Braddersden from attack from space. This is a post-Star Trek seventies Yorkshire, where traditional loyalties are threatened by mysterious men in black. But who are they?
Published 1997. ISBN 1 899114 36 X

Karl Spracklen: Ten
(84pp perfect bound £5)
Ten moves away from Karl Spracklen's specialist subject of Rugby League (as evidenced in his two previous novels) into a harsher world, with the story of a visionary boy and his grandfather, one at war with his environment, the other at war in his memories. Ten is a poetic, surreal confrontation with the brutal materialism of the contemporary city, and the brutal depersonalisation of war, a world where bewildered angels must ask small boys for guidance.
Published 2004. ISBN 1 899114 85 8

Liz Tolan: Compound Fracture
(64pp perfect bound £5)
A novella of city strangeness, that absurd hypereality of normal life in the urban desert. Liz has an eye for the tragi-comic helter-skelter of city stories, and her characters manage to love and be loveable despite apparently lacking much control over their own actions. Compound Fracture is Liz's first publication, and marks the arrival of a distinct voice, able to tell stories of contemporary life in a Northern voice without any of the Northern sterotypes.
Published 2004. ISBN 1 899114 81 5

whale & gargoyle images by David Pitt