Smokestack Books

Smokestack Books Smokestack Books is an independent poetry press. It aims to keep open a space for what is left of th

Smokestack is very sorry to report the death of John Lucas, who has died of cancer, aged 87. John was a poet, novelist, ...
23/09/2025

Smokestack is very sorry to report the death of John Lucas, who has died of cancer, aged 87.

John was a poet, novelist, critic, essayist and literary historian, Professor Emeritus at the Universities of Loughborough and Nottingham Trent and the founder-editor of Shoestring Press.

He was the author of studies of Dickens, Clare, Browning, Bennett, Crabbe and Gurney, several books on English poetry, eight novels and a series of memoirs – Next Year Will Be Better, Closing Time at the Oak, The Moon Looks Down on Them All and 92 Acharnon Street (which won the Dolman Best Travel Book Award), as well as A Brief History of Whistling (with Allan Chatburn).

John’s translation of Egils Saga is an Everyman Modern Classic. and The Awkward Squad: Rebels in English Cricket was shortlisted for the Cricket Writers’ Best Book of the Year.

His books of poetry included About Nottingham, Studying Grosz on the Bus, Flying to Romania, One for the Piano, On the Track, A World Perhaps, The Long and the Short of It and Portable Property. Smokestack published Flute Music in 2006.

There are a few tickets still available for this Sunday night's performance of Martin Rowson's take on Alexander Pope's ...
16/07/2025

There are a few tickets still available for this Sunday night's performance of Martin Rowson's take on Alexander Pope's The Dunciad at the Cockpit Theatre - featuring Stewart Lee, Rosie Holt, Eliza Carthy, Arthur Smith, Tim McInnerny, Mark Steel, Clare Ferguson-Walker, Jack Klaff, Matt Copson and Nick Revell. Tickets here https://www.thecockpit.org.uk/show/re-enchant_july

Release the Sausages! Poems for Keir StarmerOut this week from Culture Matters – a new anthology of poems celebrating th...
14/07/2025

Release the Sausages! Poems for Keir Starmer

Out this week from Culture Matters – a new anthology of poems celebrating the first twelve months of Keir Starmer’s government – from the heroic refusal to scrap the two-child benefit cap, cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance, disability benefits and overseas aid, to televised deportations, undeclared ‘gifts’, drilling for oil, appeasing Trump, attacks on the right to protest, airport expansions, increased defence spending, and Gaza, Gaza, Gaza.

Appropriately for a political leader whose speeches leave everyone speechless, the book contains no poems at all, by over 50 poets who have nothing to say about a man who has nothing to say.

Release the Sausages is launched at the Lit&Phil Library in Newcastle on Wednesday 30 July, 6-8pm, when some of the poets who are not in the book – including W.N. Herbert, Bob Beagrie, Tom Kelly and Jo Colley – will be discussing the role of poets in ther Age of Starmer, Farage and Trump. How do you ridicule the ridiculous? Why try to ‘speak truth to power’ when nobody in power is listening? Can poets seriously engage with contemporary issues when so much public discourse is reduced to blatant lies, implausible claims and dog-whistle politics?

10/07/2025

To mark the closure of Smokestack Books, I am organising an exhibition of Smokestack book-covers. They are objects of beauty in themselves, and constitute a kind of visual history of the press over 20 years and 237 titles. Consisting of 15 x A1 framed posters (see attached), the exhibition opens next week at the Waiting Room on Teesside (9 Station Road, Eaglescliffe, Stockton TS16 0BU) until 6 September.

Thereafter the exhibition is being shown in Skipton, Northallerton, Whitby, Stokesley, Ripon and Stockton libraries. Possible venues in 2026 – Rural Arts in Thirsk, the Cockpit in London and Salford University Atrium – to be confirmed.

Smokestack is very sorry to report the death of the poet-historian John Seed, who has died aged 74.John taught for many ...
22/04/2025

Smokestack is very sorry to report the death of the poet-historian John Seed, who has died aged 74.

John taught for many years at what is now the University of Roehampton. His books included Dissenting Histories: religious division and the politics of memory in eighteenth-century England and Marx: A Guide for the Perplexed. He was an associate editor of the journal Social History.

Poetry collections included Pictures from Mayhew, That Barrikins, New and Selected Poems and Smoke Rising: London 1940-41, and Brandon Pithouse (Smokestack, 2016), which set out to recover the lost and silent world of Durham pitmen – in the company of Walter Benjamin, Sid Chaplin and Charles Reznikoff, drawing on statistics, diaries, fragments of recorded speech and parliamentary reports.

Smokestack is very sorry to report the death of the US poet Fred Voss, on 26 February, aged 72. Fred was an extraordinar...
11/02/2025

Smokestack is very sorry to report the death of the US poet Fred Voss, on 26 February, aged 72.

Fred was an extraordinary poet, the heir to writers like Charles Bukowski, Philip Levine and Robert Tressell. Abandoning a PhD in English Literature at UCLA in 1974, he spent the next fifty years working as a machinist in steel-mills up and down the West Coast. He published several collections of poetry in the UK, three with Bloodaxe, Goodstone (1991), Carnegie Hall with Tin Walls (1998) and Hammers and Hearts of the Gods (2009), two with Culture Matters, The Earth and the Stars in the Palm of Our Hand (2016) and Robots Have No Bones (2019) and one with Smokestack – Someday There Will be Machine Shops Full of Roses (2023).

Fred’s books are beautiful hymns of praise to skilled workers everywhere, especially those who handle the dangerous Promethean gift of fire – the noise and the silence, the long shifts and short tempers, the old-timers and pushy young machinists, profits in the boardrooms and wage-cuts on the cold shop-floor, the bravado, the boredom and the comradeship.

Smokestack is sorry to report the death of the Dutch historian, writer and poet Guus Luijters on 3 January, aged 81. Guu...
10/01/2025

Smokestack is sorry to report the death of the Dutch historian, writer and poet Guus Luijters on 3 January, aged 81. Guus published more than thirty books, including In Memoriam: the deported and murdered Jewish, Roma and Sinti children 1942-45, Rapenburgerstraat 1940-1945 and Kinderkroniek 1940-1945: letters, testimony and diaries from the Shoah and the wonderful Song of Stars (Smokestack, 2018) about Sientje Abram, an eleven year-old girl from Amsterdam murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.

Out from Smokestack on 1 DecemberMartin Rowson, The *untsiad ‘O give me the gift of wrath disguised as wit / To dredge t...
11/11/2024

Out from Smokestack on 1 December

Martin Rowson, The *untsiad
‘O give me the gift of wrath disguised as wit / To dredge these odious monsters through the sh*t’. Award-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson reboots Alexander Pope’s early eighteenth-century satire The Dunciad in order to revenge himself on the monsters of our own Age. Accompanied by the shades of Pope, his dog Bounce and Hogarth’s pug dog Trump, Rowson explores the fashions, fads, follies and f**kups of contemporary Britain. The result is a rowdy, raucous modern vision of Hell and its servants – public schoolboys, bankers, wankers, war-mongers, Tories, Faragists and lumpen Fascists. A mock-heroic epic Who’s Who of all the greedy mountebanks, liars, knaves, fools and c***s who have brought us to this pass.
ISBN 9781738515400
Price: £7.99

Martin Hayes, Machine Poems
Martin Hayes’ new collection confronts head on the colonisation of human life by machines –the way we work, how we interact with each other, the language we use, the dreams we share, the way we treat the planet, and how much we have already lost. From smart phones to computer games, social meeja narcissism to moral apathy, almost every kind of human behaviour is now affected, altered or under threat by machines and their infantilising, magical and destructive charms. Is it too late to switch off the machines? I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that…
ISBN 9781738515417
£7.99

Smokestack is sorry to report the death of the poet Hugh Underhill on 25 October, aged 87.Hugh taught at universities in...
11/11/2024

Smokestack is sorry to report the death of the poet Hugh Underhill on 25 October, aged 87.

Hugh taught at universities in Hong Kong and Australia. His books included Between Two Worlds: A Survey of Writing in Britain and Ireland 1900-1914, The Problem of Consciousness in Modern Poetry and five collections of poetry, including Found Wanting (Smokestack, 2008). For Hugh, poetry was an act of commitment, political and personal, against the world's disarray. His heroes were Bunyan, Blake, Robert Bloomfield, Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney. His writings were shaped by the belief that a poem should be a made thing, an act of craftsmanship, and that living acquires meaning through commitment and choice.

30 years is more than enough! Free the Kurdish poet Ilhan Sami Çomak!PEN Norway, the undersigned PEN Centres and PEN Int...
10/09/2024

30 years is more than enough! Free the Kurdish poet Ilhan Sami Çomak!

PEN Norway, the undersigned PEN Centres and PEN International, express their extreme dismay at the unanimous decision of the parole board convened at Silivri Prison, Istanbul, to rule against the release due on 21 August 2024 of Turkey's longest-serving student prisoner, internationally-regarded Kurdish poet and honorary PEN member Ilhan Sami Çomak.

Çomak was arrested whilst studying geography at Istanbul University in 1994. He reported being tortured for 19 days before signing a false confession to having set fires in forestry above Istanbul in the name of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Çomak was cleared of this bogus charge, but found guilty in October 2000, by a State Security Court, of the crime of separatism and sentenced to life imprisonment . In 2007, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that his right to fair trial had been violated. Çomak was sentenced to life in prison - a term of 36 years - following a retrial that began in 2014. We note that it is usual to release prisoners once a retrial has been ordered and we question how Çomak was kept in prison for eight years after the ECtHR had ruled that such a retrial was necessary.

Çomak was due for release on parole on 21 August 2024. However, the parole board, to which a new member was added just one week prior to its final convening, found to unanimously deny Çomak his freedom despite his declaration to dedicate his life to the pursuit of literature and poetry. The board listed the four or five times that Çomak had supposedly spoken a political slogan or made 'unnecessary noise' over a period of 30 years in prison. They determined that Çomak had not shown enough remorse for the crime of separatism and that his case should be reviewed in three months' time. PEN Norway and other PEN Centres will be closely monitoring the proceedings due to take place after the submission of an appeal to the board's decision within 15 days.

PEN Norway and the signatories wish to express their extreme frustration at the cruel and baseless ongoing imprisonment of this highly regarded poet, whose work itself is a testament to his peaceful aspirations, and strongly oppose the seemingly politically-motivated extension of his detention.

PEN Norway and fellow Centres make it known that they will be closely monitoring the progress of the appeal of Çomak's lawyers against the parole board decision of 20 August 2024 and hope to see the overturning of this arbitrary and vaguely-outlined decision. İlhan Sami Çomak has been denied his freedom for his entire adult life to date. He should not be detained a day further.

Signed:

PEN Norway
PEN International
PEN San Miguel
Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann
Swedish PEN
PEN Québec
PEN Netherlands
Vietnamese PEN Abroad
Wales PEN Cymru
PEN America
PEN Esperanto
PEN Català

Out from Smokstack on 1 OctoberStephen Sawyer, Carrying a Tree on the Bus to Low EdgesWriting in northern time through l...
10/09/2024

Out from Smokstack on 1 October

Stephen Sawyer, Carrying a Tree on the Bus to Low Edges
Writing in northern time through lockdowns and into the meta-crises since, Stephen Sawyer asks urgent questions about what it is that makes us human in the face of so many threats to life and what sustains it. Carrying a Tree on the Bus to Low Edges is a forest of stories and voices, a portrait of the uprooted, unheard, locked in and locked out of place and time, a soulful, luminous meditation to reaffirm bonds and identities that cross borders and epochs, now more than ever under siege.
ISBN 9781739473488
Price: £7.99

Sheree Mack, Darkling
Sheree Mack returns to poetry to explore how a Black woman can survive and thrive in a White
Supremacy culture. Darkling is a book about black women, black bodies, black lives and black
deaths – like Renisha McBride, Sarah Reed, and Saartjie Baartman (exhibited naked in London in
1810 as the Hottentot Venus). It’s a history of the enslaved, runaways and lynch-mobs, police violence,
the Scarman Report and Black Lives Matter, censorship, colour-blind liberalism and white racism. It’s a book of layers, a palimpsest through which racism and violence always shows through in the end. But Darkling is also a book about ecology and memory, bodies and grief, nature and healing, about learning how to be within the landscape and the sea, in order to be reconnect with others and self with joy.
ISBN 9781739473495
£7.99

OUT FROM SMOKESTACK ON 1 AUGUSTS.J. Litherland, Marginal Future Drought. Flood. Storms. Every year SJ Litherland wonders...
14/08/2024

OUT FROM SMOKESTACK ON 1 AUGUST

S.J. Litherland, Marginal Future
Drought. Flood. Storms. Every year SJ Litherland wonders if she will survive the winter to see the spring. The planet is under siege. The weather can no longer be trusted. The damage has already been done. Her Marginal Future is buffeted by childhood trauma, the collapse of the Durham coalfield and USSR, and a cold Brexit wind. COVID comes as a reckoning of ills illuminating the past and not yet written future. In her long isolation her memory is full of wealth, a cinema with a stock of films. The book interweaves the approaching apocalypse with the lifetime already lived, the garden in its seasons, a warning and a bequest.
ISBN 9781739473471
£7.99

Marilyn Longstaff, Being Gemini
Born under the star sign Gemini, thrust into an adult secular world from an unquestioning faith background, Marilyn Longstaff lives somewhere between the miraculous, the magical and the everyday. Being Gemini is a book about the two sides of everything – lockdowns, ageing, deafness, politics and bereavement – and learning to be ‘neither one thing nor the other.’
ISBN 9781739473464
£7.99

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Three new titles out from Smokestack on 1 November

Eduardo Embry, DEAD FLIES

Chilean poet Eduardo Embry’s Dead Flies is a book of tall-tales, fables, riddles and unlikely stories about the strange, sly logic of disobedient matter and the ‘indecent mischief’ of things. Philosophical, playful, lyrical and absurd, Embry marches backwards on argumentative feet, wondering why God moves like a motorbike, flies play dead, everything falls under the auctioneer’s hammer and heaven roars with laughter.

ISBN 9781916012127 Paperback £8.99

Owen Gallagher, CLYDEBUILT