Our Personal Book Choices

 In Dream Logic, poet Satya Bosman moves through the hazy terrain between memory and imagination, loss and renewal. Her debut collection is a delicate meditation on belonging — on the fragments of the past that persist, flickering just beyond reach, and the quiet ache of searching for something unnamed. Through myth, intimacy, and moments of startling clarity, Bosman explores how writing itself can become a form of return: a way of finding home in the self when the world feels unmoored.

Bosman, founder and co-editor of Black Cat Poetry Press, has been widely published in journals including 14 Magazine, Acropolis Journal, The Lake, Porridge Magazine, and The Storms Journal. Winner of Third Prize in the 2025 Kent & Sussex Poetry Society folio competition, she brings to this debut the assurance of a poet attuned to nuance and silence.

Lyrical yet grounded, Dream Logic invites readers to linger in the spaces between things — where absence hums with meaning, and where the boundaries between the real and the remembered dissolve into something tender, uncertain, and true.

Publisher: Crumps Barn Studio
ISBN: 9781915067777
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 7 mm

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Set between the shadows of postwar Germany and the lingering turmoil of the Vietnam era, Jerry Simcock’s Giselle and Mr Memphis unfolds through the journal of Ignatz Himmelsputz — survivor, dwarf, and entertainer. Living in 1970s Frankfurt with Giselle, a trans singer and fellow survivor, Ignatz begins to record his past after an unexpected encounter with Hermann, the son of the SS officer who once controlled his fate. What follows is a haunting, layered narrative that bridges personal trauma and historical reckoning. Ignatz recounts his forced companionship with the officer’s sister, a young woman with Down’s Syndrome, whose tragic story exposes the cruelty of the Nazi euthanasia programme. In the present, he faces Giselle’s own struggles with identity and memory,  while developing an uneasy friendship with Herman, who is seeking to uncover the hidden secrets of his  child psychologist father’s Nazi past. Drawing on his own experiences in Frankfurt’s countercultural scene, Simcock crafts a deeply compassionate meditation on survival, forgiveness, and the shared human need to heal. Both intimate and universal, Giselle and Mr Memphis is a striking debut — part confession, part testament — exploring how even the deepest wounds can open the way to understanding.

Publisher: Vagabond Voices
ISBN: 978-1-913212-26-1
Dimensions: 210 x 140 x 19 mm 

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An experienced copywriter and creative director, Julian Gorham has used and abused the English language more than most. In his poetry, he enjoys playing with ideas and words. He likes the way words look on the page as well as how they sound when read out loud. "In my head", he says, "Writing is drumming and music. The aim? Not a false beat or note from start to finish. I happen to be a great nephew of the American, British-born jazz legend Sir George Shearing". Ten Poems and Ten Poems Too are his first pamphlets. Limited editions of 250 were printed in 2024 and 2025 by Paekakariki Press in London at the Walthamstow print works once owned by William Morris (yes, him). Matt Mckenzie, has built a reputation as a publisher and printer of poetry using traditional presses and techniques. For Julian, a pamphlet means freedom and variety. "With no title to embellish or editor to please, you can write what you like before you bore yourself, or worse, your readers. I can't claim my themes are unique - nature, transience, liminal spaces, life, death, love. But I try to write well and be thoughtful and interesting". "I want my poetry to be accessible, but sophisticated too and certainly a celebration of the richness of the English language. Musicality and rhythm are important. I like some performance poetry, but a good performance can always save a bad poem. To be read off the page by a reader is the real test and that's what I respect and prefer". The cover of Ten Poems is illustrated by Julian's late father Max, a good amateur artist who produced and sold many fine paintings in oil, and drawings in pen and ink. The cover of Ten Poems Too is by the artist Nelly Dimitranova, who trained at art school in Bulgaria from the age of 13, then at the RCA, and has exhibited at the Royal Academy and internationally. "We met through a mutual friend", says Julian. "She liked the lines I wrote, I liked the lines she drew. She made a single image from motifs inspired by different poems. She has illustrated a volume of poetry before - Christmas by the late, great Irish poet Paul Durcan. At least one of us is in good company" A few signed copies of Ten Poems and Ten Poems Too are still available from Julian's website. £10 each inc P&P. https://www.juliangorham.com/contact

Publisher: Paekakariki Press
Limited Edition, signed copies.

Steve Denehan’s A Quarter Dead and Half Alive is a beautifully crafted, wide-ranging collection that lingers at the intersection of humanity and the environment. Foregrounding ageing parents and new family arrivals, then zooming out to take in the natural world, it is tender, wry, and wildly relatable, shot through with humour and hard-earned wisdom. A prolific and widely published Irish poet, Denehan builds here on the strength of six previous collections, where the everyday and the profound meet the joys of creativity and the darker edges of modern life. As Cauvery Madhavan notes, “Steve Denehan takes the simplest of words and magics them into profound statements that will make you rethink life, love and living.” He lives in Kildare with his wife Eimear and daughter Robin, and is the winner of the Anthony Cronin Poetry Award and twice winner of the Irish Times New Irish Writing, with work published in Poetry Ireland Review, Westerly and beyond. Asked about this collection, he remarks with characteristic understatement, “It’s just another one of about five billion trillion poetry collections out there.” Perhaps. But this one sings. 

Publisher: Renard Press
Paperback with flaps

160pp

ISBN: 9781804471609

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André Maurois' Ariel, ou la Vie de Shelley (1923) stands as a seminal fictionalised biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the visionary Romantic poet whose life embodied rebellion, poetry, genius, and tragedy. Blending meticulous historical research with elegant narrative flair, Maurois crafts an intimate portrait of Shelley not as a distant icon, but as a vibrant, flawed human— "Mad Shelley" at Eton, eloping radical, and ethereal exile. The book traces his arc from aristocratic youth to untimely death by drowning in 1822, at age 29, weaving in his avant-garde political and societal views and poetic masterpieces.

Maurois' work achieved instant acclaim, selling 60,000 copies in its first year and inspiring the inaugural Penguin Paperback in 1935, translated by Ella D'Arcy. Its enduring appeal lies in fictionalised the Romantics: Shelley's stormy first marriage to Harriet Westbrook, his passionate union with Mary Godwin (author of Frankenstein), and his magnetic bond with Lord Byron during Italian sojourns. Amidst scandals—expulsions, financial woes, child losses—Maurois evokes Shelley's skylark-like spirit, soaring yet earthbound.

Alix Daniel's 2025 translation revives this classic for modern readers. As a French-born London-based physician and polymath (writing as Docteur Cybirdy), Daniel delivers the second unabridged English edition, infusing it with idiomatic vitality and accessibility. Her version skips "lightly along," correcting dated phrasing from D'Arcy's while preserving Maurois' poetic cadence.  It's well worth a look.

Publisher: Cybirdy Publishing Limited
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1068678267

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1068678264
Dimensiones ‏ : ‎ 19.7 x 2.3 x 12.8 cm

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John Elkin’s Cairn City Cairn Ville invites readers into a vivid new mythology: a world where words become stones, symbols and spells. Conceived as a “language of Anthropoetry,” Elkin’s work blends literary imagination with anthropological inquiry, crafting a city both real and metaphysical. In its towers of rock and echoing homes, wanderers gather, their voices carrying songs of wonder, loss and love.

This special bilingual and illustrated edition offers English and French readers a rare, immersive encounter: poetry as a living structure, translation as dialogue. Alix Daniel’s French rendering - sensual, faithful, and full of rhythm - extends the book’s dreamlike resonance. A writer, translator, and medical doctor also known as Docteur Cybirdy, Daniel brings a lyrical precision that mirrors Elkin’s visionary craft.

Together, poet and translator create a text that transcends language boundaries, offering a shared mythology for the modern reader. Cairn City Cairn Ville is both spell and study - a landscape built of feeling, reflection, and imagination, where every line becomes a cairn marking the path toward a deeper human connection. You need to visit...

Publisher: Cybirdy Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1068281480 / 9781068281488
Dimensions:  111 x 181 mm, 140 grams 

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