I’m rather chuffed today to see the full contents for the forthcoming Salt Publishing anthology The Best British Poetry 2011. It’s quite a roster of many of the best new and emerging poets from the UK, with plenty familiar names and a good number that are new to me. It is particularly pleasing that my sequence “10 x 10”, which was recently published in Gutter magazine, is included.

The book is scheduled for publication in mid-September. It looks like Roddy Lumsden has done a great job and the anthology will be an absolute corker. In the meantime, feast your eyes on that beautiful cover. And, to whet your appetite a wee bit, here’s the first poem from that sequence:

1. Origami

You are a folded deer quick-stepping
the bog-cotton muir of a how-to book.
Hind for the white hart whose leathery heart you have
smoothed to bleaching linen or a page
freshly rolled in the mill, I adore you

for every crease unironed in your nature.
Not for me the copper-bottomed überbeauties,
those bronzed denizens of the glossies
who are glazed like fine porcelain and just as vacant
as washed tins dropped in the recycling.