Salt

  • In the last of our posts for the Six Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Isobel Dixon pays tribute to Syd Barrett: Astronomy Sonnetry “This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,” whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ from The Wind in

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  • In the second of our posts for the Six Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Jasmine Donahaye has a brush with a dark angel: An angel is passing And the silence which falls suddenly on a group, at a party, a silence that elongates, extends, becomes something unbreakable, camaraderie disintegrating, returning each of you to your awkward

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  • Six Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery is back! This year, we’re on at 7:30 pm for 8:00 pm on 15 August 2013, with Isobel Dixon, Hannah Lowe, Rob A. Mackenzie, Richard Price, Jasmine Donahaye and me. Tickets are £5 from the gallery or on the door. As in previous years, I’ll be posting a poem from

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  • Money makes the world go wrong in this poem from Rob A Mackenzie, the last from the other 06 | 16 readers: The Packs Something is wrong: the wolves drag their spectral bodies through spritely towns, which have never known the burial of bones in back gardens. The sound of snapping plastic echoes between fenceposts:

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  • It’s only a week until the 06 | 16 — The Fruitmachine extravaganza at the Fruitmarket Gallery! To entice you even more, here is Isobel Dixon, with a poem inspired by Sean Penn’s film Into the Wild — based on Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name — about the life, and death in Alaska,

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  • For the second of our poems from the 16 August Fruitmarket readers, Tony Williams is and isn’t in a listening mood: Listening I didn’t mean to overhear the scrape of chair legs on the floor and sour breath of the bored, enshadowed janitor nor how he conflabbed on the stairs (it echoed in the squarish

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  • We kick off the poems from the 16 August Fruitmarket readers with Chris McCabe celebrating in the Honest Toun: 30th Birthday, Musselburgh And sat under the papier-mache mermaid, the table an afterlife of seafood – like your first memory: starfish along the railway tracks. Purple flints in the emptied wineglass – for so long pregnant,

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  • Wow! There’s been some truly amazing news for my hard-working, tireless, dedicated publishers, Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery: one of Salt’s novels has been longlisted for the Booker prize! The book in question is Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse, which is out next month. Chris’s Facebook and Twitter feeds have been full of the frenzy (print runs, rights

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  • So, today is my last day of the bursary time. It has gone pretty well, I think, although I’ll only get a proper sense of that when I sit back and look at everything I’ve produced over the period. I’m quite looking forward to that task. And even though I haven’t produced anything new today,

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  • Last on the 06 | 16 front, here’s a poem from me, first published in 5PX2: The Melody at Night, With You Snow bound and determined to break out of the silence enforced by chronic fatigue Jarrett is at his piano again (the first time in let’s not contemplate how long for a man as

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  • Here’s a wee round-up of what six Salt authors, including me, are up to in Auld Reekie this August: Salt in the Edinburgh Festivals « blog.saltpublishing.com.

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  • Mark Burnhope enters the ranks of Salt Publishing this week when his debut pamphlet, The Snowboy, is published in the Salt Modern Voices series. Mark, an exciting young poet, will be popping by Tonguefire in August to talk about the pamphlet, poetry, disability and faith. Meanwhile, to whet your appetite in a slightly unorthodox fashion,

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  • 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

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  • Simon Barraclough gets to the core of things with these delicious short poems from his new book, Neptune Blue. Don’t miss him at the Fruitmarket on 16 August. Starfish Heart swabs dead cells from the jungle gym of my ribs as it clambers about, fooling doctors and cardiographs. I wonder why it has five limbs?

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  • Rob A Mackenzie gets musical for our second poem from the 16 August Fruitmarket readers: Yo La Tengo Top of the Pops, backing tracks battle with vocal autotune, emerge as helium monotone: DJ Corporate’s Legless Crew remix ‘Bores on 45’ and for the ninety-fifth week running Yo La Tengo are non-movers at number two, above

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