New from Five Leaves, What's Your Problem? by Bali Rai

"...you get used to the everyday abuse once it's been happening for long enough. It becomes part of your life. Your routine."
Jaspal's family moves from the inner city to a Midlands (Nottinghamshire, as it happens) village when his dad opens a shop. He's the only Asian kid around and this new life just isn't for him. Though he quickly makes friends at school, the insults from others begin. Jaspal's life tells him that everything will be okay, but the racism gets worse. Jaspal's life will never be the same again.
I'm really pleased to have this Bali Rai book on our list. Bali is in Leicester and our paths cross quite a lot. He's forever speaking in schools and will be appearing at our forthcoming young adult day in Derbyshire, of which more anon. He has also spoken at States of Independence. You can find out more about his many books, now in many languages, at www.balirai.co.uk. This book is for teenagers - "reluctant readers" - and is something of a pair with David Belbin's Secret Gardens, also set in Nottinghamshire. Dave's book is about refugees, and is also for reluctant readers.
You can get the book here: http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/what-s-your-problem/

John Rety, notebook in hand

As mentioned a couple of posts ago, some notes on John Rety's A Notebook in Hand, new and selected poems (Stonewood Press)... At Free Verse, Five Leaves shared a reading with Smokestack and Hearing Eye, the publishing house of the late John Rety. Stephen Watts, an old friend of Five Leaves, read from one of his two bilingual Hearing Eye publications telling part of the story of his nonno, his Italian grandfather, on his journey to London before channelling John Rety, his friend and former publisher. Rety's book is one of two from the new Stonewood Press. Founder Martin Parker contributes a short preface to the book, which, with a Foreword by Stephen and an afterword by John's daughter Emily Johns, is perhaps the nearest we'll get to a biography of the admirable (if not always easy) John Reti/Reti Janos. I confess I bought the collection primarily for the prose, the stories about this immigrant Hungarian/Jewish bohemian, national team chess player, publisher, organiser and anarchist who finally, and to his regret, ceased to be a "stateless person" only in 2007. It would be wonderful to think that someone would write a fuller biography of a very full life, began in Hungary, continued in Britain since 1947 and which ended in February 2010.
One particularly sad part of his life was at the end of the Hungarian part of the WWII, his grandmother went up to a Hungarian fascist to tell him the war was over. He shot her dead.
John Rety was certainly productive. Having arrived here aged seventeen, he wrote a novel in English just a few years later. A committed libertarian, he was for many years the poetry editor of the communist Morning Star, but his greatest contribution was Hearing Eye, and the linked Torriano Meeting House, hosting Sunday night poetry readings since 1982.
At the reading, among other poems, Stephen read a yearning-for-utopia poem, aptly called "Freedom", dedicated to another dead anarchist, Philip Samson. Philip, John, and others such as two Five Leaves writers, Colin Ward and Nicolas Walter were part of a generation of talented writers, propagandists and fun-loving free spirits around the journal Freedom. All greatly missed.

Still Life, Gordon Hodgeon

Somewhere in my CD collection there's one called Classic Weepies. God knows why I, or anyone else, would choose to buy something with such a title. Though there are times... But I do have a nominal set of "classic weepies" from poetry. These include Gerda Mayer's "Make Believe", with its closing lines: "GERDA MAYER, born '27, in Karlsbad, / Czechoslovakia... write to me, father."; Jon Silkin's "Death of a Son"; Adrian Mitchel's "Victor Jara of Chile" - all of which have, not surprisingly, turned up in past Five Leaves' anthologies. Now I have to add to this list of weepies "The Leaving", by occasional Five Leaves contributor Gordon Hodgeon. "The Leaving" appears in Gordon's Smokestack book Still Life, bought yesterday at the Poetry Book Fair.
There is no easy way to describe this poem, but Gordon is now living in a rehabilitation unit in Peterlee, unable to move his hands and legs, unable to breathe without a ventilator. This collection was dictated to friends or typed with the use of Dragon voice recognition software. Gordon can no longer write directly. In this poem he describes two meetings with his wife,  Julia, one of him being taken, disastrously, to the care home she is living in, the other a visit by her to him, after which he describes the comfort of waking in the early hours, hearing her regular breathing in the night, but the breath he is hearing is that of his ventilator filling and emptying his lungs. The whole collection is not solely about his quadriplegic life, including, for example, memories of his days walking "To Long Meg" and elsewhere, but hanging over the whole collection is "This Bed" - a site far away from the current paralympics.

Free Verse: Poetry Book Fair report, now with added Brum

Going to book fairs with a stall involves a succession of targets:
1) Come back with less books than taken. This is not easy as although Five Leaves provides my living, book fairs are where you see a lot of books rarely seen in bookshops, published by colleagues and friends of yours.
2) Make enough money to pay for your stall hire and train fare. Exposure and a nice time is one thing, but the office budgie needs its seeds.
3a) Make enough money to pay for the early morning taxi to the station, the cup of coffee at the station, the sandwich bought from Pret a Manger at dinner time, the coffee and sandwich on the way home, the late night bus, the two books that got damaged over the day, the ones that now need pensioned off because after a few stalls nothing looks pristine...
If there was a 3b) it would be to pay something towards the time involved in a day long trip plus packing and unpacking, and the general overheads of the press but somehow that never happens.
4) Get some exposure and have a nice time.
A day out at yesterday's Free Verse Poetry Book Fair in London organised by CB Editions certainly achieved many of these aims. I caught up with old friends, met some new and interesting people and sold 16 books. It didn't reach the giddy heights of 3b but I'd have gone anyway and though the day is long it is hardly working down a coal mine. With 54 stalls - probably, as Charles said in the programme, the biggest gathering of poetry publishers ever there was a lot of competition for sales so I'm pretty pleased with 16 books. I know some people did worse, I know some people did better. And it was busy. There were a few readings, including Andy Croft having six minutes to represent the whole of Five Leaves output in a joint session with Smokestack and Hearing Eye (a set of poetry's left wing) but the emphasis was on books, books, books. What was hugely encouraging was the wide age range of those present, with many, many young people, diligently working their way round the stalls. Impressive.
The stalls themselves ranged from the serious and professional (think Carcanet) through to hand-crafted pamphlets in a cardboard box set (http://www.likethispress.co.uk/about) but mostly somewhere in the middle. One stall was giving away slices of freshly cooked ham, carved off the bone, with a small glass of red, with every purchase. The smell put me off, so I never found out who they were*, but made me think that next year the veggies need to fight back. Free peanut butter sandwiches with every purchase from the Five Leaves stall? Yup that'll do it.
There was of course time for old hands to have a ritual moan about the Arts Council, it's what we do, but this was seriously undercut by the Arts Council support for the day, which enabled CB Editions to pay the fares of out of London presses. And this meant many presses that could not have afforded a train fare and stall hire were represented. So as well as being the biggest gathering of presses, this was probably the most representative, with people from Manchester, Norwich, Edinburgh, Hastings, Bristol, Bridgend - everywhere, really, including three from Nottingham. This reflected the thought that had gone into creating a great day by Charles and Chrissy at CB Editions. I am sure 54 publishers and many hundreds of people are grateful to them.
PS - returning to my first point, I rather meanly only came home with two new books - Notebook in Hand, new and selected poems by John Rety (Stonewood) and Still Life by Gordon Hodgeon (Smokestack). I'll post about them both later.
* Later - it was the Scottish publisher Happenstance, chums of ours!
PS - Charles Boyle has written his own blog about the day, on http://sonofabook.blogspot.co.uk/

And the next day the indie presses of Birmingham had their second book fair. Pippa from Five Leaves was there:

"The Five Leaves Elf put on her Five Leaves T-shirt and toddled off to Birmingham yesterday, armed with three boxes of books and a float composed almost entirely of pound coins and coppers (thanks boss!)... After navigating the strange streets almost successfully, she berthed the Thunderbug in a car park which has no lifts. Oops.
Last year’s Birmingham Independent Book Fair took place in the depths of Digbeth, and didn’t attract a huge number of punters. This year, in contrast, we were in the Council House, right in the city centre. There were various Olympic celebrations going on in the square, and I think in the building itself, so there were plenty of people trickling through the lushly carpeted room packed with publishers and booksellers. At some points the room was so full I couldn’t see the stalls opposite.
There may have been related events going on throughout the day, but I didn’t get to go to any as I was flying our stall solo – the pressure! the responsibility! I sold 22 books, which Ross tells me is a good number. This included several books I hadn’t expected to sell (Cotters & Squatters, Jazz Jews, Rock'n'Roll Jews) and all four copies of Maps that I’d taken with me. Interesting... I’d thought fiction would sell better than non-fiction at such events, but I’m not sure that it did. Several people showed interest in our Palestine-related books, and I had a long chat with a young woman who’d done a Jewish Studies degree at Southampton University ‘just because she found it interesting’. As far as I could tell she wasn’t Jewish, and had no connection with the Jewish community.
All in all it was a worthwhile day for Five Leaves, and we look forward to next year’s Fair. Congratulations to Jane Commane of Nine Arches and everyone else involved for making it a success."

Five Leaves Gypsy book hits the Mail and Sun!

Here's the Mail review - an astonishingly good one - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2192031/MUST-READS-Out-Now-In-Paperback.html. Yes, yes, I know that the Mail and Romanies are thought of in the same way as, say, the NHS and Jeremy Hunt, but it is a good review. But wait, that's not Five Leaves, that's Abacus. Indeed, we sold the mass market rights to Dominic Reeve's book to Abacus and they have done well with it, with reviews so far in the Sun and the (Glasgow) Herald and a lot of copies appearing in WH Smith. So, scratching my head here, why is it that when we first published Beneath the Blue Sky the only reviews appeared in Romani journals worldwide, for which we give thanks, but no reviews appeared in the general press? And WH Smith? Could it be because we is small?

"the first female beatnik author"

Cathi Unsworth first reviewed the Five Leaves/New London Editions The Furnished Room in the Guardian. Here, reprinted from 3:am, she is allowed more space to talk about the author, Laura Del-Rivo - also introducing a couple of new stories by Laura in 3:am itself. Track back to them on http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/laura-del-rivo-back-in-black/

Laura Del-Rivo’s The Furnished Room came as a revelation to me, for many reasons. While I was researching my novel Bad Penny Blues, I was trying to track down a film called West 11, directed by Michael Winner and scripted by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, that was set bang in the middle of the era and the location I wanted to write about. But the film proved elusive and I didn’t get to see it until after the book was published. It was screened as part of Portobello’s Pop-Up Cinema in the autumn of 2010, and was introduced by the ever-entertaining Mr Winner himself. Whereupon it was revealed that the author of the book on which the film was based was someone I had actually known for over 20 years, through visiting her stall on Portobello. I loved the film, and its evocation of an era of beatnik rebels, bottle parties, art students, and a Rachmanesque Ladbroke Grove haunted by Mosley rallies and standing in the shadow of the wrecking ball was precisely the world I had been trying to conjure in my book. When Laura said that Five Leave Press would shortly be publishing her original manuscript, I was even more delighted.

The Furnished Room is a vivid evocation of a shifting world, caught between the monochrome post-War austerity and the bright new generation who would turn the Sixties Technicolor. It has one foot forward in the world that Laura came from, the Ladbroke Grove of Colins Wilson and MacInnes, Peter Blake and Pauline Boty, and one foot behind, in the Soho demi-monde of Iron foot Jack and Daniel Farson, with characters that seem to represent the crossing of the eras.
Convent educated in Surrey, Laura, like so many bright young rebels from the suburbs, couldn’t wait to leave the straitjacket of suburbia and pitched up in Rathbone Place, W1, in the early Fifties, where she entered the door of a little club and into a whole new world. It wasn’t long before she joined a house of writers, actors and painters in 24 Chepstow Villas, West 11, which included Colin Wilson, Dudley Sutton and Bill Hopkins. The celebrated photographer Ida Kar caught the image of Laura in all her austere, raven-haired beatnik beauty in a portrait that is now in the National Portrait Gallery. The Furnished Room was published in 1961, making Laura the first British female beatnik author. It is a work that still fizzles off the page, the energy of that post-War, pre-Swinging world captured every bit as vividly as the works her more celebrated contemporaries, Shelagh Delany’s A Taste of Honey and Lynne Reid Banks’.
Readers who enjoyed discovering The Furnished Room as much as I did will find plenty more to savour in the two new pieces first published here on 3:AM. ‘Dark Angel’, in particular, captures Laura’s unnerving gift for describing time and place with a cinematic verisimilitude. Beginning in the Soho of her youth, she describes the bombed-out West End and the sort of shady dives where she entered the world of the bohemians that existed on the fringes of criminality, esoteric bookshops, fake Barons and mystics, actors and spivs. Moving forward into the Eighties, she then evokes a lost Ladbroke Grove that I well remember from my own youth, when it was still seedy, snotty and alive with possibility – the first place I ever desperately wanted to live and have, like Laura, never been able to leave. The shorter ‘Krissman’ is another speciality of the author – a finely tuned portrait of a mind unravelling, that anyone with a predilection for the anti-heroes of Patrick Hamilton’s manor will savour.
In fact, anyone with a love of London, and the unsung heroes and villains who tend to have been written out of history, will read Laura’s work and wonder why she has been forgotten for so long. Here is a woman who has lived her whole life in the company of mavericks and chancers, visionaries and dreamers, who all contributed to changing the artistic landscape and created bodies of work that continue to challenge and enlighten successive generations who stumble upon them and eagerly devour. She hasn’t lost the edge that first brought her here, nor has she de-tuned herself to what goes on around her, as her remarkable ear for dialogue proves. A market trader on Portobello to this day, she really is a true writer of the streets.

Orwell and the Wonga Question

Andy Croft's 1948 is still picking up reviews. Here's the latest, in London Grip: http://londongrip.co.uk/2012/06/poetry-review-summer-2012-croft/. The reviewer is generally positive, but comments that Andy too frequently steps back to comment on his work within the text. Other reviewers have also admired the work but suggested these authorial asides were best avoided. Indeed, that's about a summary of the reviews. I congratulate the author for the admiration, I blame the publisher for leaving in too many of the asides. But reviewer Thomas Ovans also says "I cannot help reflecting that Orwell’s precise writing style would surely never have found room for so graceless and ugly a word as “wonga” – even for the sake of a rhyme". Aha. Off to my Orwell... The only problem is that dipping into Orwell takes time as dipping in takes an afternoon. There's always this wonderful collection of Orwell quotes for the time-challenged (a phrase Orwell would also have found graceless) - http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3706.George_Orwell. But one good quote might answer Thomas - "A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”
Sadly, Wonga does the trick. Just don't borrow money from them.