Summer update from Valley Press

Dear readers,

We've had our fair share of joy and sadness at Valley Press since the last newsletter. I'll attempt to bring you up to date below - starting with our latest book, which needs to be put in some historical context...

When I met Nigel Gerrans in 2009, he had been writing poetry for 70 years, and I had just taken my first tentative steps into publishing - bringing out two books by myself with the words 'Valley Press' on them (to add a hint of professionalism). It was whilst talking to Nigel that I realised publishing other people might be an interesting and rewarding pursuit. Later that year I published his collection Tenebrae, and a couple of weeks ago I was delighted to re-publish those poems, with many others, in a new volume - It Is I Who Speak: Selected Poems.

Edited by the poet's long-time friend and collaborator Felix Hodcroft, this new publication collects the very best of Nigel's work across the decades; including some poems never seen anywhere else before, dug out of the archive and pieced together from various drafts and typescripts. It's been a real labour of love for all involved; a volume which we hope will be read and enjoyed for decades to come. Find out more and read a sample here.

Onto other news now, and there was a flurry of excitement at VP HQ last weekend, when our March novel Grandmother Divided by Monkey Equals Outer Space was recommended by William Boyd as a 'summer read' for 2015 in The Guardian. In case you can't quite make it out from the image, he said the following:

“Nora Chassler’s extraordinary Grandmother Divided by Monkey Equals Outer Space breaks all moulds. Set in 1980s New York, it is a triumphant vindication of the edgy, eccentric demotic as a compelling narrative voice.”

Not bad eh? Thanks to VP poet Mike Di Placido for supplying me with a copy of the paper, running home to get it after encountering me in the Post Office queue - whilst simultaneously purchasing and cooking some garlic bread. (I expect that's how Bloomsbury's press department handled this item too.)

The next thing I should mention is the reading group I organised via the last newsletter, which turned out to be a great idea; very useful indeed. The volunteers seemed to enjoy it - a little too much, even, as they were very nearly locked in Woodend overnight! I'll run another one at the end of the year, and allow a full day for the group to work through the envelopes and make its recommendations. Unless everyone pictured above wants to come back again (there are only five seats!) I'll need some new volunteers, so keep an eye out for that.

So, you may ask, what does this mean re: submissions? As of 6:57pm last night, I have settled the Valley Press publishing schedule for spring 2016 (in pencil - but a thick, black pencil that is hard to rub out). What this means is, if you submitted during our window that ended in June, and I haven't expressly emailed you by now saying you're in, you didn't make it.

I still plan to write to all the submitters individually, but as that's going to take several weeks, I thought a general announcement here would be helpful and not considered too rude. Huge thanks to everyone who sent their work in, it was by far the strongest six months of submissions we've ever received - absolutely top notch. I've been turning down bona fide TV stars, writers of bestsellers, people whose last four books were published by Random House ... it's beyond belief, really.

All of the above made me stop and think what a long way Valley Press has come, since the humblest of origins in 2008; and how it couldn't have happened without all the people who have helped out along the way. My week became a lot more poignant yesterday when I heard that Jenny Drewery - a lynch-pin of the Scarborough cultural scene, and the best proofreader ever to pick up a red pen - had passed away. Jenny worked frequently with Valley Press; if you've read pretty much anything we published between 2012 and 2014 you will have benefited from Jenny's invisible and meticulous work. She was also a wonderfully warm and encouraging personality, and will be much missed. Her friends and family have set up a page here where people can donate in her memory; I'd be delighted if any newsletter readers wanted to contribute.

There are just a couple more things I must mention in this newsletter (ridiculously long as it has already become): you have until 3pm on Wednesday 22nd July to listen to the radio version of Humfrey Coningsby on BBC iPlayer, which you can do here - well worth 45 minutes of anyone's time. Also, for the first time in four years I am doing a 'solo gig', in Covent Garden on Monday 20th July (this Monday!); all details available via The Emma Press. (N.B. I'm also reading at the event listed on Tuesday, and would love it if any VP fans dropped in.)

I think that's everything for now - thanks for reading, as ever, and look out for more news very soon.

All the best,
Jamie McGarry (VP Publisher)

Mike Di Placido reviewed by Jonny Aldridge

JM: I don't normally post reviews, but this is a great piece, not currently available on any website - but soon to be published in Myths of the Near Future magazine. Mr. Aldridge is fast becoming one of my favourite reviewers - check out his ingeniously-formatted thoughts on Miles Salter's Animals here.

- - - -

"A master of tone": Mike Di Placido's A Sixty-Watt Las Vegas

In short: this is a very very good book of poems by Mike Di Placido. Having moved on from his professional footballing days in debut pamphlet Theatre of Dreams (Smith/Doorstop, 2009), he has returned with witty, funny and bold poetry from a Yorkshire "househusband". That explains the poem about a hoover, then.

These 30 poems are an idiosyncratic bunch: three are vignettes of animals, four are imagined meetings with T.S. (Eliot), Ted (Hughes), Simon (Armitage?) and Dickens, and seven are set in Scarborough with musings on Britishness, history and suicide. All are first-person narrated, a lot with "you" present too. And they are mostly very personal and very engaging.

Di Placido's at his best when he is writing—we presume—autobiographically. We meet the dad, the wife, the godson, the first employer 'Albert', and we find out "whatever happened to uncles". The writing probes at nostalgia—embracing it, but cynically—as when the narrator reminisces on his first job as a porter’s assistant at "The Norbreck Hotel, Scarborough, 1968". "Then we lost touch. As you do", he writes:

"Until today that is, when, walking down

memory lane past the hotel, I see you staring

owl-like through a window,

waiting for the coaches to arrive."

There is a clever play going on here, with the "lane past the hotel" pun and the simple diction only hinting at the importance of "memory" in preserving our idols, in this case preserving them almost in "cryogenic suspension" ('Uncles'). We would be privileged to get more of this from Di Placido, and I would happily read an autobiography of his whole life in poetry if it came in at this standard.

Di Placido is a master of tone: he plays the literary muser, the true romantic, the social commentator and the stand-up comic all in one. I think he knows this, and is very sly in using it to his advantage. In 'Heron' we expect a comic skit on this "ridiculous" bird, "this gangling oddball", and then he ends with this magnificent stanza:

"But not that skewer of a beak

you imagine a fish seeing

through the shattering glass,

the whirl of water."

That "shattering glass" is the best poetic phrase I've seen in a long time. And if you read it with Di Placido's Yorkshire rasp, the dropped vowels make it all the more impressive. (Here he is reading 'Hare'.) This is not the only instance where Di Placido approaches the issue of underestimation. The witty opener to 'Alfie's Magic Wand' doubles as a "serious" statement on the topic of audience and reception: "He started to cry when he first saw me, / which I took as a positive sign – / nice to be taken seriously."

Having said this, let's not write him off as a defendant for the underdog. Within Di Placido's colloquial style these poems are esoteric, ultra-specific and intellectually acute. Because of this, you get insight into Di Placido's inspirations and motivations. Most poems are anchored by a real detail, a time, a place, which he has remembered and wanted to sanctify in poetry. I love that 'To R. S. Thomas' begins with a sentence-long quotation on poetry and God from a daily newspaper—"R.S. Thomas (The Independent, Saturday 27th February 1993)". And twenty years later Mike has published a poem about it! Another poem cites an article from "Scarborough Evening News, 13th March 1991", but then others are inspired by Christopher Smart’s 18th-century religious poem ‘Jubilate Agno’ or Robert Lowell’s ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’. Di Placido takes inspiration from wherever and whenever—which isn't to say everywhere and anytime—and he re-imagines events in his own inimitable style.

The weakness? A couple of poems seem to jar with the rest of the collection, something which could be easily avoided by more rigorous editing. These are times when Di Placido tries for an elevated and urgent tone, and it falls flat. In 'Recovery' especially, where "you’ve pieced back / together your heart, / re-inserted those eyes", or 'The Assassin' (death) who "does answer us / when we interrogate the arid silence / [...] silence is his answer". The poet obviously felt the need to make this collection more dynamic but, seeing as this kind of drama doesn't come easy to him, he should have more trust in his own voice.

Of course, a true test for any work is how much it fails to meet the publisher's description. In this case, Valley Press says that the poems "demonstrate wit, wisdom, and Di Placido’s continuing ability to reveal the extraordinary from the ordinary." It's a credit to Mike's work that this is pretty much true. And at 27p per poem, this collection is well worth it. Go. Buy.

A Sixty-Watt Las Vegas by Mike Di Placido is published by Valley Press at £7.99