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Visiting Fellow Neil Astley's first novel, At the End of My Tether (Flambard), has been shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize! For details of the book, click here. For details of Neil's day job, click here.

A series of lunchtime readings organised by the School of English. The readings are held at 1pm in Lecture Room 2.3, the Daysh Building, Claremont Road. They are free and open to the public. Bring a sandwich and listen to the best in contemporary poetry.

7th November: Linda France reading from her new book, The Simultaneous Dress (Bloodaxe). Linda's favourite sandwich is: brie and cranberry in a sesame seed roll.

5th December: Jackie Kay, current Northern Arts Literary Fellow, poet, novelist, playwright, children's author. Jackie featured on R4's Thought for the Day on National Poetry Day. Read the poem she chose to read out. Her favourite sandwich is avocado and alfalfa sprouts and mozarella cheese.

6th February: Gillian Allnutt, Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Lintel, her most recent collection, was a Poetry Book Society Choice.

6th March: Julia Darling & Cynthia Fuller. Julia is well-known as a novelist, poet and playwright; Cynthia's last book was Only a Small Boat (Flambard) Both are currently Royal Literary Fund Fellows with the University.

8th May: Desmond Graham, Professor of Poetry. Desmond's last book, After Shakespeare, has recently been translated into Polish.

Graduates from the first Poetry MA at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne will be reading from their new anthology First Eleven. Including many if not all of the following:

Maureen Almond, Joanna Boulter, Monica Cheale, Julia Darling, Rima Handley, Joyce Hodgson, Jeanne Macdonald, Alison Rowsell, Anne Ryland, Fiona Ritchie Walker and Heather Young

‘Many of these women have already made their mark on the literary scene of the North East -- Vane Women, Wild Women, Poetry Virgins, Mudfog Books, Iron Press, Diamond Twig, as well as winning awards and competitions. Some are already stars in the Northern firmament; the work of others falls into that most satisfying category: delightful discovery.’

All readings take place on Fridays at 8 pm at the world famous Morden Tower, West Walls, Back Stowell Street unless otherwise stated. Admission: £3.

29th November: Arjen Duinker. Holland's prizewinning poet reading from his new book, The Sublime Song of a Maybe (tr. Willem Groenewegen). Part of Arc's Poetry Live Vertex Tour.

13th December: Michael Donaghy and W.N Herbert. Mr Donaghy's most recent publication, Conjure (Picador, 2000), won the Forward Prize. His work has long been prized for its formal elegance and philosophical wit. Mr Herbert's Big Bumper Book of Troy is out now from Bloodaxe. He promises not to read the same poems as last time.

‘Here is writing…which is surprising, subtle and professionally crafted…these eleven poets come together as the first students on our ‘Writing Poetry’ MA: a dream team indeed for all those who taught them.’

‘…dazzles with fresh women’s voices. There is a real variety here. The poems cross borders: historical to contemporary, mythical worlds to real ones. Poetry should let you see everything as if for the first time. Stylish as well as deeply felt poems, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and often moving anthology.’

Anna Woodford, The Higgins' Honeymoon, Driftwood Publications, 5 Timms Lane, Formby, Liverpool L37 7DW, email brian@seftonarts.fsnet.co.uk ISBN 0-9539217-5-1 £3.00, 22 pages.

'Anna Woodford has already won an award and her pamphlet The Higgins' Honeymoon (Driftwood Publications) shows her promise. The title poem follows Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins into their wedding chamber where 'She's loud as a headboard,/slips into her comfortable mother-tongue/he whispers haitches into her ear./In Spain, it continues to rain.' The recalcitrant Cockney sets the tone for a number of poems in which expectations are raised and then refused. 'Little Girl Dreams' of being an angel are bleached out by those of 'men, coaxing/my eyelids closed like lace curtains. I'd shake under my duvet/like a clenched fist in darkness.' These similes are startling and satisfyingly exact. The fine cover painting is wasted on flimsy card and the title and contents page are framed in black, so they look like death notices. The work itself, though, should entice.'

INSPECTOR KERNAN is investigating the murder of Bernard Tench, a whistleblowing scientist who knew too much about BSE. As Kernan uncovers links between sleaze and slaughter, between pollution and police, his new sidekick Diana Hunter realises that her eccentric inspector is no ordinary man but a policeman with a mysterious past and special powers.

Kernan doesn't just know his Loamshire patch like the back of his proverbial hand, he uses its folklore, songs and superstitions for guidance. His animal informants and supernatural allies help him against the sinister Superintendent Goodman as his adversary conspires with fat cats, crooks and cronies to cover up not only the Tench murder but the killing and betrayal of the country.

Kernan's irregulars frustrate and disrupt Goodman's devilish plot as well as the plotting of the book itself, turning what might have been merely a dark ecological thriller and a perverse English love story into a comic battle between good and evil, attacking what's rotten in the state of England with infectious humour, killing jokes, dangerous sheep, sauce and sorcery - with big explosions, animal miracles and gripping cow chases to spice an outrageous narrative of epidemic proportions.

NEIL ASTLEY lives in the Tarset Valley in north Northumberland. He is the editor of Bloodaxe Books, which he founded in 1978. He has published several poetry anthologies, including Staying Alive, Poetry with an Edge and New Blood, a critical book on Tony Harrison, and two collections, Darwin Survivor (Peterloo, 1988: Poetry Book Society Recommendation) and Biting My Tongue (Bloodaxe, 1995). He has received a Gregory Award for his poetry and a D.Litt from Newcastle University for his work with Bloodaxe Books. The End of My Tether, his first novel, was written with the assistance of several animals.

Desmond Graham has published three collections of poetry with Seren. For Flambard he has co-translated a selection of poems by the important modern Polish poet Anna Kamienska Two Darknesses. Now Professor of Poetry at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne he is the biographer and editor of Keith Douglas, the outstanding British poet of World War II.

From reviews of Desmond Graham's Not Falling (Seren 1999) in which eight of the After Shakespeare poems first appeared:

'...a remarkable evocation of a neighbourhood sinking into decay, yet peopled by odd, forgotten lives; outsiders, lovers and loners, washed up seamen and retired policemen, seen in the light of Shakespearean prototypes.'
NEW WELSH REVIEW

'...a gallery of urban low-life cleverly linked to Shakespearean analogues. Thus an old Frank Zappa fan and biker turned tattoo artist is an inner-city Prospero... and a painter of Hell's Angels crash helmets is Ferdinand, transforming reality in unpromising circumstances into art and exhibiting 'a love of light where you would least expect to find it.' Graham, a poet who notices such things, has a way of finding those fugitive rays of light.'
Nicholas Murray, POETRY WALES

'Graham comes at cultural classics from unexpected angles...Macbeth runs a protection racket, a thug with a Rolls and mobile phone, and Coriolanus is a mafioso gangster...the breadth of reference enables him to embrace playfulness and a sense of poignancy and affection.'
Claire Powell, PLANET

A virtual orphan from an early age, Elizabeth Bishop was brought up by relatives in New England and Nova Scotia. The tragic circumstances of her life - from alcoholism to repeated experiences of loss in her relationships with women - nourished an outsider's poetry notable both for its reticence and tentativeness. She once described a feeling that 'everything is interstitial' and reminds us in her poetry - in a way that is both radical and subdued - that understanding is at best provisional and that most vision is peripheral.

Since her death, a definitive edition of Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems (1983) has been published, along with The Collected Prose (1984), her letters in One Art (1994), her paintings in Exchanging Hats (1996) and Brett C. Millier's important biography (1993). In America, there have been numerous critical studies and books of academic essays, but in Britain only studies by Victoria Harrison (1995) and Anne Stevenson (1998) have done anything to raise Bishop's critical profile.

Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery is the first collection of essays on Bishop to be published in Britain, and draws on work presented at the first UK Elizabeth Bishop conference, held at Newcastle University. It brings together papers by both academic critics and leading poets, including Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Deryn Rees-Jones and Anne Stevenson. Academic contributors include Professor Barbara Page of Vassar College, home of the Elizabeth Bishop Papers.

'Elizabeth Bishop's poems are quiet, truthful, sad, funny, most marvellously individual poems. They have a sound, a feel, a whole moral and physical atmosphere different from anything else I know. They are honest, modest, minutely observant, masterly. The more you read her poems, the better and fresher, the more nearly perfect they seem' - Randall Jarrell

(Linda Anderson is Professor of Modern English and American Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and has helped to design a new MA in Writing Poetry in the Department of English Literary & Linguistic Studies. Her publications include Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction (Edward Arnold, 1990), Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century (Prentice Hall, 1997) and Autobiography (Routledge, 2000), and she is co-editor with David Alderson of Territories of Desire: Contemporary Queer Culture (Manchester University Press, 2000). She is now writing a critical book on Elizabeth Bishop.

Jo Shapcott is one of Britain's leading poets. She was Northern Arts Literary Fellow at the universities of Newcastle and Durham in 1998-2000, and was Visiting Professor of Poetry at Newcastle in 2000-01, when she gave the first Newcastle / Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures. Her books include Electroplating the Baby (Bloodaxe Books, 1988), Phrase Book (OUP, 1992), My Life Asleep (OUP, 1998) and Her Book (Faber, 1999). She has twice won the National Poetry Competition, and won the Forward Prize in 1999.)

Contributors: Ric Caddel, Keith Jafrate, David Kennedy, Martin Stannard,
Mark Robinson, Andy Croft, Lawrence Upton, Ellen Phethean (with an essay about the Blue Room), Debjani Chatterjee, Jonathan Davidson

Words Out Loud is published in paperback in May 2002 £7.95.
Orders should be made to Stride, 11 Sylvan Road, Exeter, Devon, EX4 6EW

Texts' Bones Cooperative seek to publish, produce avant garde shorter fiction - the more experimental the better. They are particularly keen to have experimental writing from women. CONTACT : email: daithidh@maceochaidh.fsbusiness.co.uk Daithidh MacEochaidh (Dave or Jim if you prefer), 9 Second Avenue, Amble, MORPETH, Northumberland, United Kingdom:

An annual of poetry and aesthetics is an international literary and philosophical journal published by Fulcrum Annual. Its first issue is now available (ISSN: 1534-7877).

The first issue’s central theme is 'A Map of English-language Poetry.' It contains poems and essays by leading poets and critics representing twelve different parts of the English-speaking world. Twelve out of the issue's 16 essays discuss the current poetic situations in those regions.

POEMS by Douglas Barbour (Canada), Pam Brown (Australia), Branston Clark (Belize, USA), Fred D'Aguiar (Guyana, England, USA), Allen Fisher (England), Randolph Healy (Ireland), Brian Henry (USA), W. N. Herbert (Scotland), Peter Horn (South Africa), Robert Kelly (USA), John Kinsella (Australia), August Kleinzahler (USA), Alan Loney (New Zealand), Paul Muldoon (Northern Ireland), Gregory O'Brien (New Zealand), Sheenagh Pugh (Wales), Menka Shivdasani (India), Matvey Yankelevich (USA), Angeline Yap (Signapore), Harriet Zinnes (USA).

ESSAYS by Douglas Barbour (Canada), Ken Bolton (Australia), Fred D'Aguiar (Guyana, England, USA), Allen Fisher (England), Randolph Healy (Ireland), Peter Horn (South Africa), Robert Kelly (USA), David Kennedy (England), August Kleinzahler (USA), Alan Loney (New Zealand), Roddy Lumsden (Scotland), Paul Muldoon (Northern Ireland), Marjorie Perloff (USA), Sheenagh Pugh (Wales), Menka Shivdasani (India), Angeline Yap (Signapore).

Issue One is 256 pages, 6x9, elegantly produced, perfectbound with a glossy cover, black-and-white cover and internal art, printed on 50# Thor Offset paper.

EDITORS: Philip Nikolayev, Katia Kapovich.
Editorial ADDRESS:
Fulcrum, 334 Harvard Street,
Suite D-2, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Phone 617-864-7874.
E-mail editor@fulcrumpoetry.com (queries only)

SUBSCRIPTION rates in the U.S. are $12 per issue/year for individuals, $15 for institutions. Foreign subscriptions are $17 and $20 respectively. $5 discount for a three-year subscription. Fulcrum needs your financial support and welcomes philanthropic donations. A check or money order payable to Fulcrum Annual should be sent to the editorial address.

Fulcrum welcomes SUBMISSIONS of poetry and essays on poetry, poets, poetic form, the philosophy of poetry, poetics, aesthetics and related subjects (no reviews). Reading the journal before submitting is strongly recommended. Unsolicited submissions must arrive between June 1 and August 31 and be accompanied by a return envelope with sufficient postage or IRCs if a response is desired. All established regional orthographic and punctuation conventions are acceptable. No e-mail submissions. Accepted work will be requested in an electronic format. No payment for unsolicited contributions except in copies. The forthcoming (2003) issue’s theme will be 'Philosophies of Poetry.'

An exciting new project is now underway to open a publishing house in Coventry. A loose collective of writers will publish new writing and foreign literature in translation. Their principle aims are to distribute high quality literature at a relatively low cost in a range of popular formats, and to make their poetry relevant to the public through social engagement and intervention.

The writers already involved are committed to improving the city’s cultural environment. As well as producing books, ideas in the pipeline include performance events, community workshops, mixed media installations, and using radio, television and the internet to increase public awareness of literature as a living art form. This will also give the press a strong platform from which to compete in the literary marketplace.

Heaventree is on the lookout for new work, in the first instance to be published in a quarterly literary journal including poetry, fiction, criticism, journalism and artworks. If you are a writer (amateur or professional) and interested in being published as part of this venture, Heaventree would like to hear from you.

HEAVENTREE PRESS