04/12/2025
Poetry Salzburg has the great pleasure of announcing the publication of "Birdmen and Astronauts", the debut pamphlet by Dharmavadana (David Penn) and No. 41 in our Poetry Salzburg Pamphlet Series. If you want to order a copy, this is the link: https://www.poetrysalzburg.com/birdmen%20and%20astronauts.htm
Although the official date of publication is 15 January 2026, copies are already available!
Dharmavadana (David Penn) was born in Dartford, Kent, UK and now lives in Norfolk. After careers as an English language teacher, writer/editor in educational publishing, charity shop assistant and librarian and thirty-five years living in London, he moved to the green city of Norwich and concentrates on writing. His poems have appeared in such magazines as Ambit, Poetry Salzburg Review, Prole, The Dawntreader, The Interpreter's House, The North, and Under the Radar, and many anthologies including Watcher of the Skies (Emma Press, 2016) and Voices For the Silent (Indigo Dreams Publications, 2022). From 2013 to 2023 he was poetry editor of the Buddhist arts magazine Urthona. Birdmen and Astronauts is his first published pamphlet.
"Birdmen and Astronauts reads like a sequence in which each poem coheres into a larger whole that expresses the unique colourings of an individual life. Without insisting on a single narrative thread or justificatory story, the poems do their work deftly without exaggeration or self-pity. A picture is painted (in quiet confidence) and left to stand. Evocative and seemingly compendious, despite its brevity, Birdman and Astronaut is one of those poetry pamphlets that give the reader just enough: enough company and companionship – sadness and joy, s*x and tragedy, childhood, mothers, aunts, lovers and uncles – to encompass a singular life."
Maitreyabandhu
"Dharmavadana’s carefully chosen words offer us vignettes of boyhood and manhood, snapshots of miscommunication but moments where connection brings deep joy. Exploring masculinity, nature and grief, these poems are both disconcerting and tender and continue to resonate after reading."
Lorraine Mariner
"This debut pamphlet holds two weights in admirable balance – a collection of deftly and economically drawn characters and incidents presented in fine-grained, telling detail, and a compelling series of half-told narratives freighted with half-revealed emotion, allusive, elusive and melancholy. Both aspects speak to each other in a conversation that deepens on re-reading. Throughout, the language and syntax are clear and uncontrived allowing us to enter without fumbling at tricky locks and follow its journey from childhood, through youth, never safe or complacent, to a complex, at times almost hallucinatory, maturity."
Kathy Pimlott
15 January 2026. 35 pp. ISBN 978-3-901993-87-9 (= PSPS 41)
£9.00 (+ 3.00 p&p), €9.00 (+ 3.00 p&p), US$ 12.00 (+ 4.50 p&p)
