The year has started splendidly with the launch of Jean Kent’s new collection The Hour of Silvered Mullet at the Newcastle Writers Festival. The weekend had a strong poetry component, kicking off with a lively panel of Jean, Melinda Smith and Jenny Blackford discussing their own and each others’ work, and then the seven-poet ‘big read’ on the Sunday afternoon in the main hall, with over 100 in attendance.

We enjoyed launching the book so much that we did it all over again a week or so later, at the new Cardiff library. Christopher Pollnitz, editor of DH Lawrence’s Collected Poems, provided the necessary obsequies, now published on line at the Rochford Street Review.

Next up is Tim Cumming’s latest full-length collection Rebel Angels in the Mind Shop, his first with Pitt Street Poetry, following up on the chapbook Etruscan Miniatures. Tim is based in London and published previously with Salt, until they decided to restrict their list to deceased poets, a career move which has its shortcomings. His new book will be launched on June 2^nd at a jolly PSP evening at our London outlet, the London Review Bookshop, just a Rosetta Stone’s throw from the British Museum as their web site so lamely boasts.   Jakob Ziguras will fly in from Poland to join us, and as Benedict Andrews is in town shooting his first movie Blackbird. we will have three fine bearded Pitt Street Poets on the one platform for the night.

The rest of the year is shaping up strongly. John Foulcher’s 101 Poems is a survey of the best of his work over nine collections and thirty years.  Geoff Page follows the success of 1953 and Improving the News with a lively new volume called Gods and Uncles.  Then a couple of new poets – new for us, anyway.  Lorne Johnson’s  illustrated chapbook Morton explores aspects of that celebrated national park, and Peter Goldsworthy makes a welcome return to poetry (he never really went away) with Rise of the Machines, his first outing since New Selected Poems in 2001. We round out the year with the third volume in our Mark Tredinnick trilogy – his legion of fans will find Body Copy a worthy successor to Bluewren Cantos and our reprint of Fire Diary.

And finally, our first book of prose – but it’s ok, the prose is all about poetry. Ron Pretty’s vade mecum for the budding poet Creating Poetry was first published in 1987 by his own Five Islands Press and has been in demand ever since. We’re proud to be publishing a revised edition, with new selections and examples, of this perennially popular textbook.