Smokestack Books

18/04/2026

As the exhibition of Smokestack covers comes to an end in Darlington Library, Andy Croft is talking about the history of Smokestack. Saturday 16 May. 10.15am-12 noon.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.