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The Mole

Over at her blog , should you fancy a look, Carrie Etter has kindly featured a poem from The Sparks , as part of a (very) brief tour of blogs I thought I'd do to promote the pamphlet. The poem is ' The Mole ' (hence the photo above), and was first published in the Times Literary Supplement early last year.

Just One Book - Salt Publishing

As those of you who read other poetry & literary blogs and/or drop into UK poetry forums will know, the enterprising poetry publishers Salt have hit hard times. Partly due to discontinued grants from Arts Council England and the current economic downturn, this is particularly depressing as Salt have always been committed to building a poetry press eventually capable of sustaining itself, something it has worked towards by seeking out and publishing some of the most impressive new poets to emerge in the UK in recent years ( Rob A Mackenzie , Julia Bird , Luke Kennard , Mark Waldron and Katy Evans-Bush , to name but a few) as well as more established writers including Jane Holland , Tim Dooley and Tobias Hill . It also has what promise to be strong first collections on the horizon from Abi Curtis , Tom Chivers and Tony Williams . To help save Salt, then, please consider the following: JUST ONE BOOK 1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy ...

A Poem a Week

I just noticed on poet Carrie Etter's blog that Oxford Brookes have set up a weekly poem service as part of their Poetry Centre webpage. If you sign up, you'll be emailed a poem each week by a poet published by one of the following presses: Anvil, Arc Publications, Cinnamon, Enitharmon, Heaventree, Landfill, O’Brien, Oversteps Books, Peterloo Poets, Salt Publishing, Seren Books, and tall-lighthouse. Looks like an interesting initiative that'll be worth following.

New Irish Poetry

Just a snippet of news in the form of my review of Barbara Smith's Kairos and Fred Johnston's The Oracle Room appearing on Eyewear .

By Way Of An Update

A few things have appeared online and dropped through the letterbox of late. The first is the new issue of Magma, No.40 , which is edited by Roddy Lumsden and one of the strongest and most exciting to date. Its focus, quite accidentally down to the 'fine poems starting to appear from so many young writers' received in submission for the issue, is on young poets, featuring an interview with the likes of Foyles Young Poet of the Year winner Richard O'Brien and tall-lighthouse poet Jay Bernard, as well as poems from a wide range of impressive young writers, and more established talents such as Ros Barber, Claire Crowther and Sarah Wardle. It's well worth a read, with particular highlights including Mark Waldron's 'I called the plumber...' (that rare beast: the successful funny poem) and Tony Williams 's richly descriptive 'Argument About the Definition of Red'. And Eloise Stonborough , a young Oxford poet and blogger, has an excellent piece, 'J...

As Bad as a Mile

It's been a long time since I posted on Deconstructive Wasteland, and it's largely (if not entirely) to do with my complete lack of internet connection. But now I've started studying on the Writing MA at Sheffield Hallam I have access to their ample IT facilities, so I can do more than check emails while perched on a stool in a charging internet cafe. Hence this brief post. If you're reading this, then, thanks for returning after a month of complete inactivity. This week, two things I've written have appeared online: first, a review of Tim Turnbull's collection, Stranded in Sub-Atomica , is up on Todd Swift's blog Eyewear , and second, my choice for poem of the month at the Philip Larkin Society's site is up, 'As Bad as a Mile' . Aside from that, I'm loving being back in Sheffield, and amid sorting out everything in my new place I've started writing critical perspectives of contemporary authors for the British Council, the first of which...

Deconstructive Wasteland is one!

I didn't notice until recently, but it turns out that I've been posting on Deconstructive Wasteland for a year now; a total of about fifty-something posts, I think, which obviously averages out to one a week. Not as shabby as I'd anticipated, anyway. So thanks to all of you who regularly read the posts, and especially to those who post comments and spark off interesting discussions, as well as introducing me to writers and musicians I would perhaps otherwise never come across. Your comments and the hits that sitemeter logs spur me on in continuing to fill this corner of the internet with my thoughts on various things literary and musical. And if nothing else, exploring and being a small part of the blogosphere dispelled all concerns and negative media-fed preconceptions I had about the place - as with most things online, if you fish around enough, you find the good stuff sooner or later. Here's to another year's blogging, then: who knows, I might even get my act tog...