Indie Publishers

‘Poetry can stick up for the weak’ according to Michael Rosen, or it can ‘mock the mighty’; it can ‘glorify our rulers or it can dissect them. You choose.’ In these powerful new poems Rosen is clear about his own choices. Listening to a Pogrom on the Radio is a book about anti-Semitism, racism, Fascism and war, Trump, le Pen, and the Tory assaults on the NHS and education the stupid and the sinister, the ridiculous and the revolting. In his first collection for grown-ups since Don t Mention the Children (2015), Michael Rosen confirms his reputation as the heir to Jacques Prevert, Ivor Cutler and Adrian Mitchell. Few poets writing today can move so effortlessly between childishness and childlike seriousness, or dare to ask, like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, why the silly emperor is not wearing any clothes.

What happens when poetry and philosophy converge? Over coffee at Leeds’ Opposite Cafe, award-winning poet Helen Mort and Professor of Philosophical Aesthetics Aaron Meskin set out to explore that very question.

Their caffeine-fuelled discussions morphed into the intriguing concept behind this book: a cross-disciplinary creative dialogue in which the poet lets her imagination loose on philosophical texts and the authors of the papers respond.

Like all the best coffee shop conversations, the results take unexpected turns through the art of tattooing, graffiti, Belle & Sebastian, food, rock climbing and whether there’s such a thing as bad art. So pull up a chair, and join Helen, Aaron and ten of the world’s leading philosophers of art for coffee, poetry and everything in between.

Shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Oswald, King of Northumbria from 635 to 642 AD, was a warrior, evangelist, hunter, scholar, martyr and, most famously of all, main rival to George s claim to be patron saint of England. Oswald s Book of Hours is a series of elegies and eulogies for Oswald, written in the voices of an unlikely band of northern radicals, including union leader Arthur Scargill, hermit Richard Rolle, brigand John Nevison, Catholic rebel Robert Aske and Oswald himself. Brutal, provocative and thrillingly original, Oswald s Book of Hours is a pocket history of northern subversion and exile, going back before the Industrial Revolution, before the Reformation, before England even existed.

The poems in Robert Walton’s Sax Burglar Blues range from vivid memories of childhood, such as ‘Twm Siôn Cati’ where a teacher ‘wiry-haired, fierce-eyed’ brings a fictional villain to life, banging out rhythms with her shoe on the floor of a Cardiff classroom, to memories of a rock‘n’roll influenced youth on the back of the Dusty Springfield night bus, or an archetypal narrative of getting kicked out of a band just before they hit the big time (‘Three Out of Four Original Members’).