Meet the Emma Press editors: Richard O'Brien

The Emma Press is introducing a new element to pamphlet submissions: authors get to choose the editor they would like to read their submission in the first round. This doesn't mean that you have to have this editor if your book is chosen, and nor does it guarantee that your chosen editor will be the one who reads your manuscript in the first round, but we will try our best.

We've put together profiles of all four Emma Press editors, to help you decide which editor might look most favourably on your manuscript. We do recommend that you read all four profiles and give them some thought, but don't agonise over your decision – if the editor reading your manuscript thinks it's good but might appeal to another editor more, they will pass it on to them.

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Hello, I'm... Richard O'Brien.

Mandatory editor selfie
in front of bookcase

I’m hoping to find... poems that take something familiar and make it something new, whether that means bringing contemporary life to a traditional form or using precise, unusual language to help the reader see an object, an experience, through new eyes. Above all, I want poems that care about communicating with a reader. I’d also be interested in building our list in the essay and creative non-fiction genres.

Three of my favourite books are... My answer to this question changes every day. When I first got into poetry, the writers I was most drawn to were Philip Larkin, John Donne and Frank O’Hara. But most of what I’ve been reading in the past few years has been a concerted effort to engage with a greater range of voices and perspectives, and I’d especially welcome submissions by authors from less well-represented groups.

I wish I’d written... In the last year or so, poetry-wise, Jason Koo’s America’s Favourite Poem (I love its swagger, and its easy familiarity with a variety of styles and traditions), and what I’ve read online by Hera Lindsay Bird – I don’t know how she does it, and I don’t think I ever could. On the prose front, I wish I could write like Leslie Jamison, or James Baldwin, or Jon Mooallem.

I wish I'd published... Jacqueline Saphra is one of our authors already, but her crown of sonnets for the photographer Lee Miller is exactly the kind of project I wish I'd worked on.

I’ve got a soft spot for... riffs on history and classic texts, forms and characters – particularly when the author uses these to explore contemporary concerns and power dynamics. Poems, with or without formal constraints, where the author actually seems to be having a good time with the voice and medium.

I’m less keen on... writing that’s complacent about its place in the world, about who will read it, about things as they are being allowed to go on more or less unchanged; but I’m not a fan of much poetry which is purely and exclusively political sloganeering, either. There are many poems I enjoy where conventional meaning-making doesn’t seem to be a primary concern – but I’m very unlikely to pick that kind of writing out of the slush pile.

Recently I edited... an anthology of poems about Birmingham, alongside Emma. I loved the range of entries we received, and the process of picking out entries which showed that breadth of approaches to the city when we came to put the whole book together. My next project is a children’s anthology about dinosaurs!

My advice to anyone thinking of submitting is... read the kinds of things we do. The Emma Press exists for a reason, and picks up work that resonates with contemporary readers in niches other publishers have neglected. It’s also worth really considering the specifics of the pamphlet form, rather than seeing it as a stepping stone to longer work.

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This round of pamphlet submissions ends on 10th December 2017. See the Emma Press website for guidelines.

This week at Valley Press, #60: 'Better than never'

Dear readers,

A very late blog post this week, as it's been a packed Friday – full of important meetings, complex tasks and some exciting parcels; including the flyers/posters for our 'Literary Lunch Hour' events (viewable here), the 'machine proof' for Today the Birds Will Sing, and the paperbacks of Madame Bildungsroman's Optimistic Worldview (photos below).

Speaking of that mysterious character... Madame B is set to be officially 'launched' in Edinburgh, on Friday 21st July at the Lighthouse bookshop, all details here. Attendees have been promised a chance to 'quiz' the author, hear sections of the book performed live, and enjoy jazz music performed by non other than legendary local poet Don Paterson! It should be quite a night, I can tell you. (Entry is free.)

Before that, author Nora Chassler is coming to Scarborough on Wednesday 5th July to run a flash fiction workshop; that's in the evening from 6pm at Wardle & Jones, our go-to independent bookshop. (For those still living in the real world, 'flash fiction' is a trendy phrase for 'very short stories'.) Attendees will be writing these stories with guidance from Nora, who's aiming for a supportive and relaxed mood. It's just £5 to attend (with a drink included), get in touch with W&J to book a place.

The wonderful Wardle & Jones has just turned two years old, and if you visit today (Saturday 24th) there's 40% off all books and an all-day party atmosphere! To run an independent bookshop for any amount of time requires a superhuman love of books, infinite patience with readers, and more than a little visual-merchandising magic... so you can imagine what it takes to last two years. Huge congratulations to them.

Oh, and while I've got my congratulating hat on... same goes to Richard O'Brien, who won a prestigious Eric Gregory Award this week for his as-yet-unpublished debut collection of poetry. Long-time followers will remember we published his pamphlet A Bloody Mess in 2014 (with Dead Ink, back when they were only doing ebooks). It was obvious back then that Richard was a poet destined for great things; and he's still just getting warmed up...

Richard will be a familiar face for fans of the Emma Press, and we were inspired this week by a typically feisty blog from their founder Emma Wright (read it here) about starting her business. 'It's not fair that the poorer you are the safer you have to play it,' she writes, about job prospects for our generation... no-one does hopeful defiance like Emma!

Another great blog this week came from Helen Cadbury, discussing her forthcoming Valley Press collection, as well as her origins as a poet and the 'forensic' nature of that art form (connecting it to crime writing). Read that one here.

A great blog post you won't be reading this week, despite promises last time, is the one from our 'Submissions Coordinator' Tess. I've ended up saying too much myself – and as I write this, midnight is fast approaching! I'll hope to bring you that soon; in the meantime, thanks as ever for your time reading our newsetter, it's much appreciated.

All best,
Jamie McGarry, VP Publisher

This week at Valley Press: 'History' in the making

Dear readers,

This week we brought a new book into the world, our first since November. History is the debut collection by Northumberland-​based poet David O'Hanlon; the first product of our two submissions periods last year. The volunteers were all over this one on the July 'reading day'; words like wow and fantastic adorned the envelope by 5pm, and it was unanimously agreed to be a 'must' for the 2016 list.

So what's it about, and why all the fuss? Half the book is actually a re-telling of ancient myths (including my favourite, 'Danaus', which you can read here.) What David has done with these familiar stories is astonishing – he's pulled out the crucial elements from each, found a completely original way of reading them, and delivered this to us in poetry that is perfectly constructed, down to each individual comma. I don't say this lightly, but in my view, that part of the book is an achievement to rival Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife.

The other poems are mostly studies of personal history, including an epic 'bildungsroman' describing a twelve-year struggle to paint an authentic picture of the sky – that's where the concept for the cover came from (it's pictured above, if you haven't seen it). These poems have plenty of their own myths, too; it all ties together beautifully. Suffice to say, I really think this book is worth reading; you can find it on our website here.

In other news, if you want your Valentine's fix, you could do a lot worse than read this wonderful article about modern love poetry by The Telegraph, featuring such charming folk as The Emma Press, Andrew McMillan and Warsan Shire. Better still, there's a new love poem by Richard O'Brien on the Emma/Valley blog, here – it's fantastic.

Richard's new poem (particularly the last line) reminded me of this classic by Matthew Hedley Stoppard; so I've decided to make Matthew's collection A Family Behind Glass our half-priced paperback of the week. You can find the book here; just enter the code FAMILY50 at the checkout to get the discount.

This is the fourth newsletter since I went weekly – hope you're all enjoying them so far! See you next week for more (and maybe a submissions update?)

All best,
Jamie McGarry, VP Publisher

Lemman, a love poem by Richard O'Brien

Happy Valentine's Day! We recently reprinted The Emmores, Richard O'Brien's pamphlet of love poems from 2013. The new edition (available exclusively on the Emma Press website) includes a new poem at the end, written a couple of years after the other poems in the book. We don't want the people who bought the first edition to miss out, so here it is:

Lemman

Lover, slumberjack, roll over in
your clown pyjamas, wonder if
it’s really all from here true comfort comes – 

from ticket stubs and hotel breakfast deals,
and cooking meals together. Chop for you,
and save what’s left the way you ask me to, 

and stock the fridge for you with juice, lemon
parfait, two kinds of cheese with unfamiliar names,
salmon for bagels. Share a single plate. 

The little rituals I assimilate,
like washing rice, wearing more red
and sleeping on just one side of the bed 

(though sometimes, your first night away,
on yours.) So find me in the kitchen
where I’ll kiss your neck and whisper 

in your ear how I like the way you
dislike things more than I like
the way most people like the things they like, 

and feel like this could be the future,
leaning lightly on your shoulder, cracking jokes
about your thermal-stockinged legs. 

I can’t believe the way you poach those eggs.

The Emmores, by Richard O'Brien

* * *
The Emmores, by Richard O'Brien
Illustrated by Emma Wright
ISBN 978 0 9574596 4 9
£5, available to buy from the Emma Press website

Why I Published our Pamphlets (Part 1)

Our open call for poetry and prose pamphlet submissions ends on Sunday 13th December and I've been thinking about what I can do to help people who are still deciding what to send us. I've already written about what we do when we process submissions, so I thought it might be useful to look at submissions from another angle and explain why I chose to publish all the pamphlets we've put out already.

You can read Part 2 here.

* * *

Oils, by Stephen Sexton (£6.50)

Series: The Emma Press Pamphlets

Oils, by Stephen Sexton

Why: These are definitely poems which grew on me each time I read them (we read manuscripts at least twice, if not three times, before even shortlisting them). I found it hard to get a handle on the poems initially, but then literally dozens of Stephen's nervy, melancholic thoughts – like 'I ask what it means when even / in my dream I'm a coward' – stuck in my head and I knew that these were special and I had to publish them.

Favourite lines: 'I can’t hold onto anything, Anne. Because it doesn’t exist, 
I’ll meet you in town. Borrow some wine from the woman 
next door, reach for glasses. Live, then show me what I got wrong.'

Captain Love and the Five Joaquins, by John Clegg (£5.00)

Series: The Emma Press Picks

Captain Love and the Five Joaquins

Why: The Pick is the original Emma Press pamphlet format and I always hoped that established poets would use it for their more experimental projects. Captain Love is a wonderful example of this, as John Clegg tells the frankly unbelievable (and yet true-ish) story of bounty hunter Harry Love, through a mixture of poems and prose. It's short, but by gum is it swashbuckling, packed with swordfights, tequila and... Zorro?!?

Favourite lines: 'Love isn’t safe. The lines across his palm, which Ezmerelda stared at for so long before confessing she could read no future there, have started to converge. One eye popped halfway open overnight and Love was busy with his needle in the morning. Nothing’s ready for the visit. Love must send to Fresno for his epaulettes. '

Raspberries for the Ferry, by Andrew Wynn Owen (£6.50)

Series: The Emma Press Pamphlets

Raspberries for the Ferry

Why: I do have a soft spot for formal poetry, and Andrew Wynn Owen's way with metre and rhyme is so infectiously playful that he had me at 'These luscious buds should be illegal / Reserved for emperor and eagle.' The language in his poems is rich, textured and colourful, which I love, and – more than that – his worldview in this pamphlet is exuberant and joyous, which makes it a pleasure to read and very easy to want to share with readers.

Favourite lines: 'I précis 

this shaky simile because I am 
so happy, life-hallowed, the carp that swim 
in the Arno know, the leaves by the dam 

rustle knowledge of it, and the pilgrim 
stops short to wish me well [...]'

Ikhda, by Ikhda, by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi (£6.50 / £4.25)

Series: The Emma Press Pamphlets

Ikhda, by Ikhda

Why: Ikhda is a multi-lingual globetrotter, so she uses the English language in a rollicking way which feels instinctive and fresh. When I was reading her manuscript, I liked how her poems had a surreal quality and could be viciously satirical and angry but also innocent and tender. This pamphlet feels feminist to me on a very personal level, so it felt important to publish it.

Favourite lines: 'I smelled your distinctive 
typical smell 
from hundreds of kilometres, 
branches of trees swaying gently. 
I walked along silently 
looking for a stud 
to marry me once 
and feed my ren for years.'

The Held and the Lost, by Kristen Roberts (£5.00)

Series: The Emma Press Picks

The Held and the Lost

Why: Escapism is a large part of the appeal of reading for me; it feels like a weight is being lifted when I can immerse myself in someone else's way of seeing the world. I've never been to Australia, but from Kristen Roberts' poems I can imagine the wide gaping spaces, luscious vegetation and oppressive heat. There are so many finely-observed details in Kristen's poems that reading the manuscript felt like stepping out into a variety of distant bedrooms, backyards and beaches.

Favourite lines: 'You cook and we eat, fingers barbeque-blackened, 
lips soft with lamb fat. Your smile is eager, 
mine a dam defying rivulets of ageing, unpaid crimes. 
 We ignore the old conversations pressing at closed doors 
 and instead talk longingly of rain.'

The Emmores, by Richard O'Brien (£5.00)

Series: The Emma Press Picks

The Emmores, by Richard O'Brien

Why: Love poems were my point of entry into liking poetry as an adult, but before long I started feeling resentful of the treatment of the muse: either they would barely be present in the poem, sidelined by the poet's interest in the poet, or they would suffer a lot of assumptions being made about their feelings. What I like about The Emmores is the honesty of these love poems – Richard doesn't pretend that these are anything other than the hopeful declarations of someone whose main pulling power is his way with words.

Favourite lines: 'and if I could I’d call tornadoes down 
to wrench up rooves of Collyweston slate, 
disintegrate unyielding dry-stone walls 
and crazy-pave a path across the fields 
to your door.'

The Flower and the Plough, by Rachel Piercey (£5.00 / £3.50)

Series: The Emma Press Picks

The Flower and the Plough

Why: Back in 2012, these poems struck a deeply personal chord with me, and I was astonished that another person could express feelings that I felt intensely but couldn't articulate. It felt like these poems were about my failing relationship and increasingly conflicted ideas about romance, and I felt all the better for having read them.

Favourite lines: '[...] when you temper
 scraps into treasure

 I think it’s worth it,
 and when you
 spit out glass

though you only got sand
I think it’s worth it.'

The Valley Press Newsletter - December 2014

Note: to keep my half of this blog alive, I've decided to post my occasional Valley Press email newsletters on here too. Enjoy!  - J.M.

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Dear readers,

As another year of flat-out publishing comes to a close, I look back on 2014 with a modest amount of pride, and a lot of hope for the future - 2015 is going to be huge. But we're not there yet. I've managed to publish two more 2014 books since the November newsletter, and I feel strangely compelled to tell you about them...

A Pocketful of Windows is an anthology of powerful, original and accessible poetry from writers in North and East Yorkshire; selected, edited and arranged by VP author Felix Hodcroft. The RRP is just £3.99, for which you get 66 poems by 36 poets; aged between 16 and 92, including familiar names and first-timers.

Though formal reviews have yet to arrive, we've had some incredibly positive reactions at the various launch events for Pocketful; and more than 300 copies have been sold so far. You'll be hearing a lot more about this book in future I'm sure - but until then, you can read a sample and more information here. 

Also out this month: a new title from our Ink Lines imprint, selected and edited by the team at Dead Ink books (particularly, on this occasion, David Tait) and brought into the physical world by Valley Press. It's a marvellous pamphlet of poems by Richard O'Brien entitled A Bloody Mess; newsletter readers can see an exclusive sample here.

If you're not a regular visitor to our esteemed homepage, you may not know that there is a special offer on the go: any two books for £12, with free postage. This won't be around for long, so head over there and make the most of it. (Top tip: when ordering, look out for a prompt that says 'Click 'add' and name your two books now' - that's the important bit.) This is the first ever 'multibuy' offer on the VP site: if it's successful there may be more in future, so there's an incentive if you needed one!

In previous years I have kept my head down and worked through the festive season - pausing only for a sip of champagne on New Year's Eve - but this year I am attempting to genuinely take some time off. This is not simply so I can put my feet up and forget about dispersing quality literature for a while; I am getting married on the 22nd December, and it will be nice to actually see the new Mrs McGarry face-to-face, rather than from behind a big pile of book proofs (which is the usual scenario).

Valley Press will close down at 5pm on Wednesday 17th December, and re-open on Tuesday 6th January; but do feel free to email and order books during that time, I'll catch up when I get back. As for everyone who is waiting eagerly for news and developments on future projects ... just hang in there folks.

All the best,
Jamie McGarry
(Valley Press Editor)

POEM CLUB #2. 'The Smell of Apples', by Richard O'Brien

Welcome to the second instalment of Poem Club! Last week, we looked at 'Lys' by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi and discussion was focused on people's interpretations of the situation depicted: was it part of a dialogue between lovers, or a refugee and an official, or a universal feminist cry of frustration? This week, we're going to look at a poem which is stylistically very different to Ikhda's, and where the situation is relatively clear: it's a love poem, addressed to a lover and intended to solicit affection.

Richard O'Brien at the BBC Proms Plus Late in 2013 

As I did last week, I'm going to share a few of my thoughts to kick things off and then suggest some ways of approaching the poem. This round of Poem Club is closed, but you can still read my summary of the comments we received and share your thoughts about the poem in the comments section.

And now, on with the poem!

* * *

The Smell of Apples

‘And beyond these isles there is another isle that is clept Pytan. The folk of that country ne till not, ne labour not the earth, for they eat no manner thing. [...] These men live by the smell of wild apples. And when they go any far way, they bear the apples with them; for if they had lost the savour of the apples, they should die anon.’ — The Book of Sir John Mandeville

O give me the thread from the hem of your dress
              that you caught in St James’s Park
and give me the blank in the blink of your eyes
              before they adjust to the dark
and give me the space in the skin of your throat

              that you smooth away with a breath

and the infinitesimal decimal point

              between your tongue and your teeth;

then give me the drip of a droplet of water

              that found its way down through your hair

and give me the light that your body divided

              and spread like a sodium flare.

Now give me the dust that you brushed from your jeans

              on the chairs in the station café

and give me the spark that was spat from the track

              of the train that took you away

and give me the dot on the ‘i’ on the map

              of the village where you live –

the cross of the ‘t’ in a neighbouring town

              if it’s all you’ve got to give.

And then give me a signal, a cipher, a sign,

              a trinket, a token, a ring,

and I’ll follow it blind to the base of your spine

              and I’ll give you everything.

– by Richard O'Brien, from his pamphlet of love poems, The Emmores

* * * 

Emma's thoughts. I usually fail to read or properly process the title when I'm reading a poem for the first time, which means the title is often the last thing I read in my poem-reading experience. Sometimes I think 'Oh of course that's the title – I could have guessed that', but sometimes the title shines a new light on the poem and I have to read the poem again with this in mind. This goes for epigraphs too; if anything I'm even more likely to skim the epigraph without taking it fully in. In 'The Smell of Apples', the title and the epigraph work together like a key to the secret code of the poem, enriching my response to the poem once I'd gone back to the beginning and the penny had dropped.

One of the reasons I think this poem will become a classic is that it wears its epic romance lightly and focuses on the mundane but enduring realities of human attraction. The title and epigraph may indicate large-scale, life-or-death declarations, but the poem itself is concerned with minutiae and ephemera which ring true to me now and (I presume) will continue to ring true with readers who recognise the heady richness of the lover's long-lens gaze.

Your thoughts. We had two fascinating responses this week, both focusing on the depiction of romantic love in the poem. Hin-Tai Ting drew out the implied link between the people of Pytan in the epigraph, who need the smell of apples to survive away from their home, and the poem's speaker whose equivalent of apples is his sweetheart. He wondered: 'To what extent should we understand the speaker as abnormal, as a different and strange type of human being?' It hadn't occurred to me before to see the epigraph as a commentary on the speaker of the poem, as well as the key to understanding it, but I really like this idea of lovers being ludicrous creatures, capable of greatness but also immense folly. This reminds me of Elegies II.27 by the Roman poet Propertius, where the poet claims that a lover can shake off the final stages of death if called back by his mistress. I feel torn between my conviction that love is a strange and powerful force and my impatience with the tolerance which lovers-as-madmen demand, so I like the edge of bafflement in Hin-Tai's verdict on lovers: 'there is something really quite bizarre and wonderful about their life-and-death strength'.

Tom saw something else in the epigraph which had never occurred to me before: the lifestyle of the people of Pytan may offer a neat equivalent to the speaker's valiant attempts to sustain his romance, but they are also very definitely fictional. The poem is a collection of insubstantial trivia assembled with such urgency that it verges on creating something solid and living, though it's really 'a nothingness, or an almost-nothingness.' I like Tom's recognition that love is something more than the shadowplay of romance and love poetry, and I love the point he makes about the intent focus of the poem and how the list format could tip over into a parody of its own genre, so 'somewhere deep in the background there might also be a hint that a "real relationship" is more than all this stuff: it actually does involve tilling and labouring.' Hear hear!

You can read both of the comments in full below, in the comments section.

This week, I'm awarding the book to... Hin Tai Ting!

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The Emmores

This episode of Poem Club is over, but you can still add your thoughts below. What do you think of 'The Smell of Apples'? Do you find it romantic? Does it work as a piece of persuasion? Would it persuade you? Is it erotic, and, if so, why? Is it really a poem about love? What's your favourite detail? What do you think we learn about the speaker and the subject of the poem? Do you like the epigraph from Sir John Mandeville, and do you think the poem would work without it? Just say what you think and what the poem makes you feel – don't be afraid of sounding stupid!

<-- POEM CLUB #1: 'Lys', by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi
--> POEM CLUB #3: 'Trickster', by Joy Donnell