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We’ve launched
a second premier book club for you.
Becoming a member of our book clubs
is an excellent way of supporting our
greatest poets and short story writers,
as well as supporting Salt's efforts
to keep independent literature thriving.
Chris McCabe’s Zeppelins flies
in to our autumn publications
With grit and humour Zeppelins takes
on the speed and surrealist chaos of
the metropolis at the beginning of
the 21st century. On the look-out for
abandoned scraps to make sense of the
sprawling whole — senseless advertisements,
discarded notes, overheard conversations – McCabe
hawks the fringes and thoroughfares
for his sources. He discovers an underground
of the cynical and power-hungry, shamelessly
clashing registers with experiences
of redemptive warmth and love.
Urban, inquisitive and with a restless
interest in the now, McCabe writes
about Pete Doherty’s arrests
and the Essex reaction to England’s
exit from the World Cup in 2006. Playful
and serious, with an eye for the strange
and comedic, this is a book about what
it means to be alive in a city as we
head towards the second decade of the
new century.
Charles Lambert’s The Scent
of Cinnamon gathers prize-winning
stories from this Picador novelist
These prize-winning
stories deal with life, love, loneliness,
delusion, misunderstanding, death.
An office worker wakes to find his
body invaded by a mysterious parasite.
A desperate woman seeks escape through
fire. A girl who knows only the forest
is taken to the city for the first
time. A solitary young boy conjures
a girl from leaves to replace his twin
sister. In one story a governess is
forced to come to terms with the truth
of the family she has loved and served,
and the world in which she lives. In
another, a one-night stand with a sadist
triggers a meditation on sexual pleasure
and serial killers. Some characters
look for work, for ways to change their
lives, for somewhere new to live; others
for someone to love or be loved by,
or to hurt. Not everyone is good. Not
everyone is honest with himself or
herself. Not everyone gets what they
want, or deserve. The stories’ settings
range across time and space, from the
colonial outback in the late nineteenth
century to contemporary urban life
in London and Rome and Paris, to both
warring sides of the Second World War.
The tone is comic, dry, satirical,
vivid, magical, disturbing, poignant,
spare. Not a word is wasted in these
stories, which describe the world not
only as it is and was, but also as
it might be.
America's love affair with death
unveiled in Jill McDonough’s
stunning debut collection
 Sacco
and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Aileen
Wuornos. A witch, a pirate, a slave
who poisoned her master. A serial killer,
a Quaker, a case of mistaken identity.
The earliest to be electrocuted, gassed,
and lethally injected; the last to
be publicly hanged. In her first book, Habeas
Corpus, acclaimed poet Jill McDonough
gives us fifty sonnets, each about
a legal execution in American history.
From four hundred years of documentation
she conjures – and honors – a
chorus of the dead. The sonnets, headed
meticulously by name, date, and place,
are poignant with the factual, with
words and actions reported by eyewitnesses
and spoken by the condemned – so
limpidly framed that at moments one
forgets the skill that tautens and
crystallizes all this into authentic
poetry
Mark Waldron The Brand New Dark is
our Poetry Bank choice
THE POETRY
BANK CHOICE. Mark Waldron’s
debut collection The Brand New
Dark is a book about sex, eyes,
eggs, dogs, death and sausages. It
is a book concerned with our loss
of faith in language, a book about
our place in the world, about sex
and love and a pair of puppets called
Dougal and Florence. This surreal,
absurd and entertaining collection
mixes the formal with the colloquial,
the tragic and the comic, the intensely
personal and the comically detached,
in a style which is startlingly original
without being obscure. Funny, dark,
disconcerting and moving, often all
at the same time, the poems are refreshingly
direct, spoken in a way that seems
to implicate the reader in their
situations and discomfiting stories. The
Brand New Dark is above all
an entertaining collection of accessible
poems. A book for all the people
who don’t like poetry as well
as for the people who do.
Julia Bird debuts with Hannah
and the Monk
 Reading
Julia Bird’s debut collection
of poems is like sorting through the
contents of an up-ended jewellery box.
Here are delicately crafted formal
love poems set with gleaming imagery,
all mixed up with the rhinestone razzle
of looser, noisier poems about urban
myths, history, film and tv. The murkier
side of life is not avoided, but these
musical, consolatory poems are accessible,
inquisitive and ultimately celebratory.
 Set in the crumbling ruins of Yugoslavia, In a Time of Drought explores the images and realities of war, destruction and dictatorship, and of fertility, nurture and peace. The key figure is the Balkan rain maiden. This gypsy or peasant girl takes on an ancient mythological authority and a wholly modern moral presence. In the wake of waste and war she is the incarnation of hope and renewal.
 Written during and after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, this book presents a complex vision of the Balkans that flinches from neither brutality nor beauty but honours dignity and courage. The book starts with a tour-de-force, the long poem ‘Do vidjenje Danitsé’ (‘Goodbye Balkan Belle’), and continues with a series of memorial tablets for victims of Jasenovac concentration camp. The book includes a sequence in memory of the Serbian, Yugoslav and Mediterranean poet, Ivan V. Lalic.
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Published in the last six months
Jump to Salt’s
latest titles from over the last six
months:
Will Stone wins the Glen Dimplex
Poetry Award 2008
 The
winners of the 2008 Glen Dimplex New
Writers Awards, in association with
the Irish Writers’ Centre, have
been announced. At a glittering gala
awards ceremony last night (10 November)
in Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery,
Mr Martin Naughton, Glen Dimplex Group
Chairman, presented the awards to each
of the five category winners.
Will Stone won the
2008 Glen Dimplex Poetry Award. Judges
Gerard Smyth and Matthew Sweeney praised
the importance and depth of Stone’s
debut collection.
The judges also shortlisted
two further Salt poets, Valeria Melchioretto
and Eleanor Rees.
Tim Dooley’s Keeping Time is
a PBS Recommendation
 POETRY
BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION. Elegant,
interesting, fluent, funny and wise,
Tim Dooley’s new collection Keeping
Time brings together lyrics
and fragmentary narratives, the remembered
and the imagined, in poems whose
every line seems balanced as if with
a spirit level. In a special issue
of Agenda on ‘The State of
Poetry’, Dooley wrote ‘the
condition of poetry isn’t soliloquy
but colloquy, a conversation that’s
been going on before the poem starts,
and is capable of being joined and
continued by others.’ Keeping
Time reflects this plural, provisional
vision.
 New
vocabularies of social and technological
change cohabit with after-images of
traditional literary forms. Key public
events of recent years are explored
alongside recurring timeless themes.
First- and third person- pieces accompany
narratives whose protagonists slip
slyly from one poem to another. This
is a poetry of light and movement that
captures the reader’s attention
in unexpected ways.
Jane Holland’s Camper Van
Blues
 Jane
Holland’s third collection, Camper
Van Blues, is a book of journeys,
both real and imaginary. The title
sequence is a British road movie told
through poems, one woman and her dog
alone in a camper van, each jump-cut
taking the reader further into the
interior of an addictive, self-destructive
personality. In a sequence of brief
and highly visual poems, Holland explores
a midnight landscape of motorways,
truck stops and lay-bys, touching by
turns on the issues of loneliness,
drug abuse and living with depression.
Taut and spare, a note of gritty humour
pervades this tale of life on the road
for the single woman.
Tania Hershman’s new book may
be the first short story collection
to be “offset” by planting
a tree for every copy sold.
What links a café in
Antarctica, a factory for producing
electronic tracking tags and a casino
where gamblers can wager their shoes?
They’re among the multiple venues
where award-winning writer Tania Hershman
sets her unique tales in this spellbinding
debut collection.
The author has won
prizes for her stories which have been
widely published in British, American
and international literary journals,
and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
Timed to coincide with London’s
Rothko exhibition, Sue Hubbard’s
tales unite the theme of painting with
the lives of women
 Rothko’s
Red is a collection of ten stories,
subtly linked by painting and art,
about the lives of women: their hopes,
fears, failures and challenges. They
reveal the choices and destinies
of characters from various backgrounds,
embracing the harsh realities of
desire, loss and ageing. Powerful,
yet tender, psychologically intricate
and emotionally perceptive, these
stories examine the complex lives
of modern women. Substantial, moving
and beautifully written they call
upon Sue Hubbard’s wide ranging
knowledge of and feel for art.
Richard Berengarten’s Selected
Writings now available in new
deluxe hardback revised editions
 For
the Living is a selection of
the longer poems of Richard Berengarten,
written between 1965 and 2000. This
edition includes the never-before
published ‘Day Estate’,
a withering indictment of Thatcherism
and its legacy.
 The
action of this book-length poem unfurls
in the public and private worlds of
corporate man. The Manager is a poet’s
response to challenges thrown down
by T.S. Eliot more than eighty years
ago in The Waste Land. Its
ground is identity, sexuality and vision.
Its occupation is mind, heart and spirit.
 WINNER
OF THE WINGATE PRIZE. A
blue butterfly lands on the forefinger
of a poet’s writing hand at the site
of a massacre. A moment of epiphany
that carries its own inner command: Write.
Chiselled out of atrocity, this book
spells passion, dedication and vision.
This is poetry to restore dignity
and hope, poetry that matters.
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