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.