Olena Kalytiak Davis’ first book,And Her Soul out of Nothing, introduced a startling new poetic voice; her second,shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities,was even more exciting in the way it, well, shattered sonnets, without any nods to tradition or respect. Shakespeare got an invigorating kick up the backside, as did the sonnet form generally, and the (American) English language.

late summer odeincludes a section of sonnets, too, and for me is the best part of the book. There’s something about the restraint and shaping undertaken that contains Davis’ wilder inclinations and tendency to ramble, repeat and drift. I’d forgotten how disappointed I’d been by her last book,The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems, and have struggled to find a way in to this one, to find any sense of structure in many of the poems.

There are…

One thing many of us love about small-press poetry is that unlike most textual production, it’s not written under the weather eye of capitalist power or for material gain. The same generally goes for non- or pre-professional academic writing, so there’s at least one area of commonality for the dissertation-poem, an infrequent fusion whose Western origins nonetheless stretch back at least to Aratus and Nicander.

As a dissertation, this book excerpts in detail from a small number of classic studies: David Lockwood’sThe Blackcoated Worker(1958) on the culture and politics of clerks; Geoffrey Mortimer’sThe Blight of Respectability(1897) on respectability and villadom; MacKenzie and Silver’sAngels in Marble(1968) on working class conservatives; Ken Worpole’sDockers and Detectives(1983) on popular reading; and especially Richard Hoggart’sThe Uses of Literacy(1957) on the effects of manufactured mass culture.

What links them all is a loose thesis about the…

The small press world was very different in 1982 when my friend Graham Palmer and I started Stride magazine. Magazines were analogue, usually photocopied or duplicated, often stapled by hand, and sales were via mail order unless you could persuade ‘alternative’ bookshops to take copies on sale or return. Even when booksellers were friendly and did sell copies, it was hard to extract money from them; and sales never covered the petrol I used up motorcycling round London stores or driving the meandering route I sometimes took to drop copies off in Oxford, Leamington Spa, Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester… 
There was, of course, no internet, email, or social media. You could swop flyers, leave them in bookshops or the South Bank poetry library, and send review copies out – often in exchange for magazines you were expected to review. There were small press fairs, often in draughty halls in…