The London Magazine – December 2008/January 2009 by Sara-Mae Tuson ed.
Mozart’s Wig, a story by Graham Buchan
Poems by George Szirtes, Anne Cluysenaar, Robin Robertson, Phillip Gross, Tim Wells, Annie Freud, Paul Lyalls, David Morphet, Neil Curry and others. ‘Working With Young Writers’, by Roddy Lumsden. Niki Seth-Smith surveys Sam Winston’s work. John Hartley Williams reviews translations and Ruth O’Callaghan on Fiona Sampson. Michael Irwin reviews June English and Dilys Wood reviews Mary MacRae. Fiction by Graham Buchan and Anthony Banks.
Fiction:
Hoodoos, Anthony Banks
Mozart’s Wig, Graham Buchan
Poetry:
Globe, Philip Gross
Student Days – Dublin in the Fifties, Anne Cluysenaar
‘Centrefold’ and ‘The Praze’, Melanie Challenger
‘Silk’, ‘Geometry’ and ‘A Poster of Marlene, 1937: After Brassai’, George Szirtes
The Cleansing, Andy Brown
‘Space’ and ‘L. A. Rain’, Tim Wells
Bibliophile, Julia Novak
Cafe Mythos, William Oxley
Magnetic Resource Imaging, Sarah Wardle
Horse, Annie Freud
Mirror – Signal – Manouevre, Paul Lyalls
In Praise of Letters, Neil Curry
GPS, David Morphet
Ode to a Large Tuna, Robin Robertson
Features:
Ruth O’Callaghan and Fiona Sampson in Conversation
Bob and Roberta Smith and the Fourth Plinth, Anouchka Grose
Art as a Life-jacket: The Importance of Therapeutic Writing, Myra Schneider and John Killick
Todd Swift on a selection of Canadian poets
Niki Seth-Smith on the work of Sam Winston
Working With Young Writers, Roddy Lumsden
Reviews:
Clare Pollard on Zoë Brigley
Dilys Wood on Mary MacRae
Leah Fritz on Nancy Mattson
John Hartley Williams on Takahashi, Lee, Grünbein, Over
Michael Irwin on June English
Cover: Silent | Listen, Sam Winston, (Giclée print with archival pigmented inks
on Hahnemühle archival fine art paper, 2007)
Andy Brown's books include Hunting the Kinnayas, From a Cliff and JD Bernal: The Sage of Science. He edited The Allotment: New Lyric Poets and Binary Myths: Volumes 1 & 2 and writes short fiction.
Melanie Challenger is the co-author of Stolen Voices published in 2006. She graduated from Oxford University in 2000, and she has been awarded an Eric Gregory award for her poetry.
Anne Cluysenaar has taught literature, linguistics and stylistics in a number of British universities. She has played a key role in the introduction of creative writing into higher education, and now hosts writing and mixed-media workshops.
Neil Curry's verse translations of Euripides, published by Methuen and Cambridge University Press, and in the USA by Doubleday, have been performed in many countries. His poems have appeared in many pamphlets and magazines, and have won several national prizes.
Annie Freud, poet and writer. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines and web-sites and in 2005, a small collection of her poems was published by Donut Press, under the title: A Void Officer Achieves the Tree Pose and she has also published a book called The Best Man That Ever Was.
Leah Fritz is a poetry and prose writer. Works include: Thinking Like a Woman and Dreamers & Dealers: An Intimate Appraisal of the Women's Movement. She has also published three poetry collections, From Cookie to Witch is an Old Story, Somewhere en Route and The Way to Go. Her articles and reviews have appeared in titles like the Guardian and Literary Review, and she adjudicated on the Petra Kenney Memorial and the Torriano Poetry competitions.
Anouchka Grose is a writer and psychoanalyst living in London.
Philip Gross is a poet, novelist and an Eric Gregory Award winner. His adult collection, The Wasting Game was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. He has performed all over England, sometimes with the jazz-based 'Vanilla Allsorts' – for whom he wrote the sequence A Game Of Henge – published as part of A Cast Of Stones.
John Killick taught for 30 years in adult and prison education, but has written all his life. A freelancer, he was writer in residence in a women's prison and at a hospice. For 10 years he ran his own small press, Littlewood, and was a founder member of the National Association of Writers in Education.
Roddy Lumsden is a Scottish poet and an Eric Gregory Award winner. His first book Yeah Yeah Yeah was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in the Best First Collection section. His second collection The Book of Love was a Poetry Book Society Choice – shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems was a PBS Recommendation. He organises/hosts a monthly reading series Broadcast.
Paul Lyalls is a performance poet who has run hundreds of workshops in schools, youth projects and prisons. He has played Edinburgh Festivals and in New York. He wrote two children's books which are now touring as plays: Are We Very Nearly There Yet? and What Do We Do When We Get There? Other published work includes Evolver, Chill (CD) and the collection Samplified.
David Morphet has published five volumes of poetry on a wide variety of themes – including love, ambition, loss, landscape, and the animal/plant kingdoms. He has co-edited the literary magazine Delta at Cambridge and edited Magma poetry magazine.
Julia Novak studied English Literature in Vienna and Edinburgh, and Arts Management at Goldsmiths College in London. She runs the annual Vienna Lit Festival. She is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Vienna and working on a book on reading groups.
William Oxley's poems have been widely published throughout the world. Among his books of poetry have been Collected Longer Poems (Salzburg University Press, 1994), and Reclaiming the Lyre: New and Selected Poems (Rockingham Press, 2001).
Clare Pollard has also won an Eric Gregory Award. Her published poetry collections are The Heavy-Petting Zoo and Bedtime, and Look Clare, Look! She has also presented two television documentaries, including one for Channel 4 with verse commentary. Her first play The Weather was staged at the Royal Court.
Robin Robertson is the author of three collections of poetry: the multi-award winning A Painted Field; Slow Air; and Swithering. He also edits Mortification: Writers' Stories of their Public Shame. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society named him as one of the 'Next Generation' poets, and he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Myra Schneider has authored poetry collections and children's novels. Writing My Way Through Cancer was published in 2003, and is the fleshed-out account from her personal journal of breast cancer.
Todd Swift is one of the leading Canadian poets and poetry activists of his generation. In 2007, he co-edited a special section on Anglo-Quebec poets for Jacket. His own publications include four poetry books, and many anthologies. His poems have appeared in Poetry Review, and the Guardian, among others. He lives in London.
George Szirtes's work is included in many national and international anthologies and in anthologies for children. His poetry has been translated into most European languages.
Sarah Wardle won Poetry Review's New Poet of the Year Award in 1999. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry News, PN Review, Thumbscrew, Metre, The Interpreter's House, The Times Literary Supplement, the Independent on Sunday and the Observer. Her poems have also appeared in anthologies, including Anvil New Poets 3 (Anvil, 2001), We Have Come Through (Bloodaxe, 2003). She is Lecturer in Poetry at Middlesex University. Her first collection is Fields Away (Bloodaxe, 2003).
Tim Wells has been editing the Rising series of poetry magazines since he founded them in 1995. John Cooper Clarke described them as, "the reader's wives of poetry mags." His latest book is called A Man Can Be A Drunk Sometimes But A Drunk Can't Be A Man.
John Hartley Williams has taught at the Free University of Berlin since 1976. His collections include Bright river yonder (1987), Cornerless people (1990), Double (1994) and Canada (1997), all from Bloodaxe, and Spending time with Walter (Jonathan Cape, 2001). Mystery in Spiderville was reissued by Vintage in 2003. Blues (Jonathan Cape, 2004) was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Dilys Wood, founder of The Second Light Network, has co-edited two anthologies, Parents and Making Worlds. Her own collection, Women Come to a Death, appeared in 1997.