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Whenever I pull together an anthology such as this, I am inevitably struck by the quality and variety of both the fiction and poetry being written today. Curating an anthology such as this is therefore both a joy and a challenge, after all, it is not easy to distil a couple of hundred pieces down into a manageable number to form a collection (in the present case, seventy-four pieces). However, for this edition of New Contexts I was struck more...

Imagine tackling the entirety of Shakespeare's sonnet cannon with the aim of creating a contemporary and modern interpretation of the poems both in terms of subject and form. Imagine starting where most poets end - with the rhyme - and beginning each new poem by stripping out every single word from each of the Sonnets except the last one on each line. Imagine that in tackling the pieces completely the other way around, the primary question bec...

Valley of the Kings is both excavation of family history and an incantation of voices telling contemporary stories that startle. The grieving son and the street angel, the coke addict meeting Piers Plowman in the service-station, the singing nightingale on Universal Credit, the homeless person in Ancient Egypt, the young lovers in their mythic hotel: all united in 'the exquisite pain of the human day'. Let 'the weight of the wind on tide' sin...

What lies beyond the familiar and tangible? In this collection Richard Lister explores what happens at life's edges. He reflects on how we respond to loss, vulnerability and hope and considers themes of perseverance and grace. Eileen Casey describes his work as 'rich in allusions and textual layers' and 'a celebration of ordinary magic perceived by a keen eye'. Richard writes with warm empathy about people who live at the margins. These enco...

Welcome to the fourth edition of our New Contexts anthology. Once again we have been able to harvest an eclectic selection of contemporary poetry and short prose from around the world. Authors in this collection are geographically spread across the United Kingdom and the United States of America, as well as Western Europe and Australasia. In curating these collections I am always struck how certain themes seem to emerge in each, as if the auth...

This is a story of landscape and community, a way of life descended from Anglo-Saxon and Viking farmers. It is a story that could belong to anyone who has lived their early years growing up on a modest dairy farm. It is about static lives, but also about movement and change, about understanding how the past walks through us, mapping our present and future. Whilst the present is a winding road that has taken me through the Middle East and bac...

At a recent reading event, I was asked which of my collections was my 'best book'. It was an innocent enough question, designed to aid a purchasing decision. It was also an unfair question. Any marginal preference I may have for one or the other is inevitably dwarfed by the knowledge that there are good pieces in all my volumes of poetry and that, in expressing a preference, a potential reader will always be in danger of missing out on somethi...

Valley of the Kings is both excavation of family history and an incantation of voices telling contemporary stories that startle. The grieving son and the street angel, the coke addict meeting Piers Plowman in the service-station, the singing nightingale on Universal Credit, the homeless person in Ancient Egypt, the famous sax player, the young lovers in their mythic hotel: all united in 'the exquisite ache of the human day'. Let 'the weight of...

This eclectic collection sings with melancholy, humour, wistful reflection and evocative insight. Written in a concise style that makes for rare accessibility to inner meaning, this is a thought-provoking and original collection of poems.David Smith is also the author of "The Stencil Room".

Above all else, this is the story of a journey. Over the last thirty-seven years or so, across a number of hand-written books, I have been keeping what might be termed a record, although on reflection, even the word 'record' is something of a misnomer. Relating to my ambition 'to be a Writer', the notebooks offer a compendium of thoughts, ideas, plans, ruminations, decisions (needed, taken, and not taken), aspirations, failings and disappointm...

Her voice is a trigger, a voice which forces Neil to relive the crises and failures of his past - one which offers him the possibility of a positive new future. But before he can decide on what he wants the life ahead of him to look like - and her role in it - he must pass judgement on himself. Ian Gouge's novels focus on individuals who are trying to come to terms with their histories, characters facing the challenge of legacies from which ...

Readers of Simon French's debut collection Joyriding Down Utopia Avenue are in a for a delightfully jolt-filled, dodgem-car ride. People search for thrills, only to find them deflating into disillusionment. Yet elsewhere there are tender, moving and funny encounters in suburbia. Turns and twists of perspective abound, surprising, often shocking and sometimes mystifying us. What we thought we had experienced shifts dramatically, and we need to ...

When people escaped gravity and started to travel in space, astronauts were amazed by the view when they looked back at the Earth. There are many photographs of such individual moments of wonder - and captured alongside these images come anecdotes recording the difficulty the astronauts encountered in trying to describe what they were seeing. This fascinates me. Not just the inevitable challenge with language and expression, but also the compu...

We are all connected. There are links - like links in a chain - that join each of us, everyone to everyone else."Degrees of Separation" is a series of short stories, each tied to the next it through one of its two characters. The book's invisible thread weaves its way across geography and time until the circle is made complete when a character from the first story appears again in the final one.But each story is also a narrative about separati...

Punctuations from History" is Ian Gouge's latest collection of poems, a volume that in various ways explores our place in, and relation to, history. Whilst there are similarities in theme to his collection "Human Archaeology" (which debuted at the 2017 Ripon Poetry Festival), the threads tying these pieces together are looser, more fluid.In an unusual departure, "Punctuations from History" contains brief 'context commentaries' that provide the...

Doomed Spanish poet Federico Lorca, ill-fated Tudor battleship the Mary Rose, a Ming dynasty porcelain flask, a sawing horse: in a collection spanning almost 40 years, Tom Furniss's poetry ranges far and wide, forging connections between past and present, sculpting fresh images from the global and historical, and from the domestic and mundane. Several early poems, such as Chameleon and Break of Day, distil complex ideas into sharp, elliptical ...

Globally the number of people being creative with language is truly extraordinary. While each of us will have our individual reasons for writing, many of them common, where the majority truly come together is in the desire to be read.There are lots of outlets for writers, contributing to an ever-expanding and increasingly densely populated literary landscape, and people continue to submit to competitions, journals and magazines. In the vast ma...

These three plays, all produced by Hertfordshire-based community theatre Pins & Feathers, tell extraordinary stories of ordinary people. With emotion and humour, they bring history to life, portraying characters challenged by events beyond their control, whose defiant voices resonate today.

Kathleen was brought up in rural Cumbria and now lives in North Yorkshire. She spent her working life in the NHS and, since her retirement, is now able to concentrate on her family, gardening and studying and writing poetry. This collection embraces relationships with family and friends and reflects a love of rural life and characters. It also takes us on visits to other countries and cultures. Her poems have been published on-line and in seve...

Oak Tree Alchemy, the title of this poetry collection brought to you by twelve members of The Poetry Society's North Yorkshire group, has a more literal than literary derivation.The poets meet, read and discuss their work once a month at The Oak Tree Inn, Helperby, a village between Boroughbridge and Easingwold. Their readings and discussions inspire them to write more and better poetry, with all its transformative powers. And they are confide...