Other Side of Sleep
Featuring 25 poems which break the rules – starting with the no-more-than-40-lines rule. If you’ve ever considered putting a poem in for a competition or an anthology, you know what we are talking about. These poems are long. They take their time. They tell a story, sometimes in a straightforward purposeful way, sometimes in a roundabout oblique way, but somewhere there is a thread of narrative woven through. Long, narrative, but by no means traditional poems, by contemporary voices. Themes both great and small are explored in narrative poems that pack a punch. Human interactions from conversation, storytelling, lending and borrowing, theft, prayer, memory, shopping and a long walk, right through to sexuality, time travel, truce negotiations, disappearance, natural disaster, violence and death are all explored, many of them rooted in landscape and place. These lie alongside equally rooted mythological and historical tales drawn from Greece, Turkey, Africa, Scandinavia and Britain. What draws all these themes together is the strength of the storytelling. Emotions as diverse as frustration, disappointment, embarrassment, hope, nostalgia, anger, and fear are channelled through spectacular poetry in many different forms into truly satisfying work. from Adrienne Silcock, Alwyn Marriage, Andrew McCallum, Angela France, Anne Macaulay, Bernie Howley, Brian Johnstone, Carl Griffin, Cathy Bryant, Elinor Brooks, Emma Lee, Geraldine Green, Inua Ellams, j.lewis, Jennifer A. McGowan, Jeremy Dixon, Jill Sharp, Judi Sutherland, Kate Foley, Math Jones, p.a. morbid, Robin Winckel-Mellish, Sam Small, Sarah Lawson, Simon Brod