DIEHARD by Mick Imlah, published Autumn 2006 Limited edition of 200 copies. 32pp 170mm x 240mm ISBN 0-9547275-9-2 Mick Imlah’s first gathering of poems for some years, DIEHARD derives from a larger, major work in hand called ‘The Lost Leader’. These are extraordinary poems of wit and high intelligence, executed with formidable technical skill and honest feeling. They are like a lost poetic history of Scotland brought to light, a modern ironic history, from AD 500, by way of a guided tour of Iona, to yesterday at a Dumfries bus depot, from Fergus Mor to John Smith, from Michael Scot to Walter Scott. Imlah’s dramatising power, his eloquence, and gift for narration never fail him. Nor do his ear for the…
Author: andrew
Anne Stevenson – A Lament For The Makers (Clutag Press, 2006)
Announcing the forthcoming publication of A Lament For The Makers by Anne Stevenson, available Spring/Summer 2006 Limited edition of 200 copies. 44pp 170mm x 240mm ISBN 0-9547275-7-6 ANNE STEVENSON ‘…it is about time that she was recognized as one of the finest poets writing in English today.’ Times Literary Supplement Author’s Preface: A LAMENT FOR THE MAKERS is a dream poem conceived three years ago while I was looking out over the golden beech trees of October, reading Arthur Burrell’s version of Langland’s Piers Plowman in the Everyman Edition of 1912. The poem also owes its existence to Thomas Sackville’s The Complaint of Henrie, Duke of Buckingham, (c. 1563) and to the selection of medieval lyrics represented in the first volume…
Andrew McNeillie and Julian Bell – Arkwork with Artwork (Clutag Press, 2006)
Announcing the publication of ARKWORK with ARTWORK by Andrew McNeillie and Julian Bell, published March 2006 24pp 170mm x 240mm ISBN 0-9547275-5-X ‘Arkwork’, a series of eleven sonnets by Andrew McNeillie, finds in the loss of the Stranraer-Larne ferry in January 1953, in which 133 passengers and crew drowned, a focus for a reflection on the literary history of shipwreck, death, and survival. The poems are superbly illustrated in dramatic drawings by the artist Julian Bell. (vii) ALTOGETHER ELSEWHERE They went aboard in ones and twos, in no great shape or order. The usual kind of crowd and would be casual but for those quayside feeling queasy blues. They were thrown together… (Excuse me.) But they’d need more than dry…
Geoffrey Hill – Poetry Reading at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford
Announcing Geoffrey Hill’s forthcoming poetry reading event at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. Details are as follows: GEOFFREY HILL: POETRY READING AT THE SHELDONIAN Poems from FOR THE UNFALLEN (1959) to WITHOUT TITLE (2006) 7pm for 7.30-10.00pm 1st February 2006 Admission Free. Sponsored byOUP Copies of A Treatise of Civil Power by Geoffrey Hill, published by Clutag Press (2005), will be available for sale at the event. [wpsc_products product_id=’630′] [wpsc_products product_id=’646′]
John Fuller – The Solitary Life (Clutag Press, 2005)
Announcing the forthcoming publication of The Solitary Life by John Fuller, available Summer/Fall 2005. Limited edition of 300 copies. 24pp 170mm x 240mm ISBN 0-9547275-1-7 A modern master of the sonnet form meditates on life and love, art and death, in a sequence of thirty-five sonnets, full of sombre depths and light discovering ‘The welcome shape of things as what they are’, inspired by the life at Vaucluse of Francesco Petrarch, in the seven-hundredth anniversary year of the great Italian poet’s birth. [wpsc_products product_id=’642′]
Seamus Heaney – A Shiver (Clutag Press, 2005)
Published: Summer/Fall CONTENTS: nine new poems: ‘Hö’fn’, ‘Horace and the Thunder’, ‘Helmet’, ‘Testimony: The Ajax Incident’, ‘Testimony: Anahorish 1944’, ‘The Aerodrome’, ‘A Shiver’, ‘Out of Shot’, ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’. How Seamus Heaney has always held his ground, through thick and thin, is something of a miracle, like the preservation in a Danish peat-bog of the Tollund Man, now revisited in this collection (‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’) and given a clean bill of health. Here in A Shiver Heaney’s ground is reaffirmed, found and kept and a stance maintained, in lifelong love, though glaciers melt and Jupiter (after Horace, Odes I, 34) finds ground zero: ‘Anything can happen, the tallest things / Be overturned, those high places…
Geoffrey Hill – A Treatise of Civil Power (Clutag Press, 2005)
PUBLICATION DATE 4th February 2005 48pp 170mm x 240mm ISBN 0-9547275-3-3 A major gathering of new work by one of the great poets, nowhere else published nor imminent in other forthcoming collections by Hill (January 2005, January 2006), comprising: ‘ON READING Milton and the English Revolution’ (12 x six-line stanzas); ‘To the Lord Protector Cromwell’ (x4 sonnets); ‘A Treatise of Civil Power’ (42 x eight-line stanzas); ‘Coda’ (8 x eight-line stanzas); ‘ON READING Burke on Empire, Liberty, and Reform’ (4 x seven-line stanzas); ‘ON READING Blake: Prophet Against Empire’ (45 lines in ten irregular stanzas); ‘ON READING Hazlitt: Lectures on the English Comic Writers’ (4 x six line stanzas); and ‘A Cloud in Aquila’ (6 x four line stanzas). In…
TLS Review, 19th November 2004
John McNeillie My Childhood pp148. Thame: Clutag. £20. 0954727509 John McNeillie is better known as Ian Niall, under which pen name he became a major figure in British nature writing of the twentieth century. A Scotsman who ended up living in North Wales, McNeillie wrote more than forty books, mostly on rural themes. He was, notes his son (the poet Andrew McNeillie) in the introduction to My Childhood, “a kind of lyric poet in prose, and an elegist who had known Eden”. That Eden was North Clutag Farm, a remote steading in Wigtownshire in the Scottish borders, where McNeillie grew up under the care of his grandparents in the late 1910s and 20s. It is these years that are the…
My Childhood Book Launch
My Childhood, John McNeillie’s previously unpublished account of his childhood and youth-time at North Clutag farm, will be launched at the Wigtown Booktown Sixth Annual Literary Festival on Saturday 25th September 2004. Andrew McNeillie will be talking about the book and selling copies at the Festival. [wpsc_products product_id=’546′]
John McNeillie 1916-2002
The Scottish writer John McNeillie, who died on 24 June 2002, aged 85, left a legacy of over forty books, among them a number of minor classics, and several decades of weekly nature journalism in the pages of the dentists’ favourite sedative, Country Life for which he wrote under the pen name Ian Niall. Not only did McNeillie possess the eye and ear of a poet, he could also tell a spell-binding story. If the natural history essay was his true métier, as found in such volumes as The Poacher’s Handbook (1950), Trout from the Hills (1961), and his memoir A Galloway Childhood (1967), as well as several other collections, dramatic realist fictions also featured in his output and were…