New from Five Leaves, Things of Substance by Liz Cashdan

Liz Cashdan's Laughing All the Way was the third book to be published under the Five Leaves imprint, sometime in 1995 and Liz appeared in our collection of Jewish women's poetry - The Dybbuk of Delight, published in same year. We haven't been her only publisher, which is fine of course, but her most regular one. I'd known her from a previous collection shared with others, published by Smith/Doorstop. I was particularly taken by the "The Tyre/Cairo Letters" sequence that won the Wingate Award and which made up the back end of Laughing All the Way. It  re-appears in her newly published New and Selected collection, Things of Substance. Among the Selected there are "threads" that appeared in her 2009 Five Leaves pamphlet The Same Country, some of her other threads - South Africa, Israel, landscape, run throughout this book.
Liz - a resident of Sheffield - also appears in our new collection of contemporary Yorkshire poetry, Versions of the North, of which more soon, and it was good to see her again at the small press fair in Sheffield and to have been publishing her off and on for eighteen years.
This collection was organised, designed and typeset by Pippa, from the Five Leaves office, with external editing advice from Cathy Grindrod (who has graced Five Leaves anthologies and pamphlet series before). I came in only to say nice things about the cover and for a final proof-read. Of course if you are proof-reading you don't quite take in the text so I'll shortly have the pleasure of sitting down to read the book properly from cover to cover. Being something of a control freak it can be difficult to let Five Leaves' books appear without shaking my head wearily and saying "I woudn't do that personally" but when it happens I quite like it. Copies of Things of Substance are available from http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/author/c/liz-cashdan-2397/things-of-substance-new-selected-poems/ or from bookshops.

Reading is dead good

A few years ago, during a Philip Roth reading phase, his book Everyman appeared. Somehow I picked up that it would be one of his best, but avoided reviews, planning to reward myself with it after a particularly difficult period - the imminent death of my father. It was, as the Irish say, a good death though my ambition to make him read a novel before dying failed. He was widely read in poetry and non-fiction, especially history and biography, but saw novels as a waste of time. How did he know if, as claimed, he'd never read one? Standing over him with an Ian McEwan shouting "Repent!" did not work and he left the world unshriven, in a literary sense. On the train home from his death I pulled out Everyman to cheer myself up. Roth fans (or friends, who know all my stories as well as I do by now) will know that there could have been better choices as the novel focusses on a man in his fifties who has a heart attack on the way back from visiting his dying father.
I tried to read on, but started to have breathing difficulties and chest pains... Unfortunately the only other book in my bag was a new book on London cemeteries by Catharine Arnold, so the long train journey passed without reading.
I was keen to get home as we had a Five Leaves launch event that night, expected to be well attended. The publication was by Cathy Grindrod, a poetry collection called Still Breathing, a rather excellent set of poems being responses to... the death of her father. Cathy is a wonderful reader, but I can assure you I did not listen to a word.
The next day, calling in at my County Hall office (I was balancing being Nottinghamshire County Council's Literature Officer with running Five Leaves), a review copy of Matt Haig's latest novel  arrived in the post. One of the secretaries, Lu Blackband, was a big fan of Haig and I asked her if she wanted to borrow it and I'd read it after her. She blanched when she saw the title, which I had somehow overlooked in passing it straight to her - The Dead Father's Club.
Friends will know why this cameo came back to mind.

Nottingham Poetry Society at 70

Traditional poetry societies sometimes get a bad press, compared to the trendy (and often transient) stand and deliver/open mic elements of the poetry scene. But, as Clive Allen says in the foreword to Nottingham Poetry Society's Seventy anthology, "Along with the Arts Council, the universities, poetry magazine editors, small press publishers and organisers of literature festivals, they make up a sort of Poetry Welfare State." He goes on: "The modesty of poetry societies belies their enormous importance. They gather in out-of-the-way arts centres, WEA buildings, church halls.... [existing] on members' subs, minuscule (and rapidly disappearing) council grants. They depend on the generosity of people who willingly and consistently give of their time and energy... I owe much of my poetry life to poetry societies..." In the contributors' notes to this collection Adrian Buckner (a Five Leaves' poet) writes that he "owes his most enduring friendships in poetry to people he encountered at his first meetings" [20 years ago].

Nottingham Poetry Society has had its ups and downs, but its membership includes several fine poets. Adrian Buckner, one of ours, who is also editor of Assent magazine; Cathy Grindrod (one of ours sometimes), who has been the Derbyshire Poet Laureate; CJ Allen himself, who knows how to win poetry competitions as no other; Derrick Buttress, a poet who could have achieved more but loves the small press scene. I could mention others.

The NPS' secretary, in charge of production of Seventy, is Five Leaves' Pippa Hennessy (we obviously don't give her enough work to do here that she has free time interests) and there is a modest influx of new members. Happy birthday, Nottingham Poetry Society.

Spoilt for choice

This coming Saturday looks interesting. Here in Nottingham you can attend Nottingham Forest versus Leicester FC (only 1,000 tickets left) or go ice-skating in the Market Square, or pick up a present at the German Christmas Market. Cathy Grindrod is launching her excellent new Shoestring Press poetry collection, The Sky Head On at Bromley House Library. Meanwhile, elsewhere in town, the English Defence League will be showcasing the worst of England in protesting against Muslims, seig heils optional. There will of course be counter protests.

It is hard to imagine that poetry is a major debating point among the English Defence League. But on the other hand, I've only just hastily returned an unsolicited manuscript about the glories of Englishness compared to say, the beastly Scots, the unspeakable Welsh and the dreadful Europeans, which was in poetic form. It is always a good idea to look at a publisher's list before sending in material.

Not that there is anything new in groups like the English Defence League. Turning to the last posting here, Roland Camberton's Scamp, published in 1950, has a character picking up a leaflet from the fictional Association of Freemen and Yeomen of England "Britons! In times of old your forefathers knew how to draw the sword for liberty. It was they who carried the flag to the furthest corners of the globe... Alien influences dominate our native land".

No doubt there was a Pictish Defence League, demonstrating against alien Romans coming across here, stealing their woad...