Best British Poetry 2012

Sasha Dugdale was born in Sussex. She works as a translator and consultant for the Royal Court and other theatre companies. Her translation, Plasticine by Vassily Sigarev, won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. She has published two collections of translations of Russian poetry and three collections of her own poetry, Notebook (2003), The Estate (2007) and Red House (2011). In 2003 she received an Eric Gregory Award.Roddy Lumsden (born 1966) is a Scottish poet, who was born in St Andrews. He has published five collections of poetry, a number of chapbooks and a collection of trivia, as well as editing a generational anthology of British and Irish poets of the 1990s and 2000s, Identity Parade. He lives in London where he teaches for The Poetry School. He died in January 2020.Vahni Capildeo was born in 1973, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. She came to England in 1991. This is her first book.Melanie Challenger’s first collection of poems, Galatea (Salt Publishing: 2006), received the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award and nomination for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. She is Creative Fellow at the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London, and Associate Artist at Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy. She lives in the Scottish highlands.John Clegg grew up in Cambridge and currently lives in Durham, where he is completing a PhD on the Eastern European influence in contemporary poetry. A selection of his poetry was included in The Salt Book of Younger Poets (2010).David Constantine, born 1944 in Salford, has published several volumes of poetry, a novel and four collections of short stories – Back at the Spike (1994), Under the Dam (2005), The Shieling (2009) and Tea at the Midland (2012). He is an editor and translator of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht. He was the winner of the 2010 BBC National Short Story Award and the 2013 Frank O’Connor Award.Abi Curtis’s first collection Unexpected Weather was a winner of Salt’s Crashaw Prize in 2008. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2004 and holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Sussex. She is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at York St John University.Amy De’Ath was born in Suffolk in 1985. She studied at the University of East Anglia and in Philadelphia, US, before moving to Australia and then to London. Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals in the UK and US and will feature in the Salt Younger Poets 2011 anthology. She currently lives and works in London. This is her first book of poems.Anthony Joseph is a Trinidad- born poet, novelist, musician and lecturer described as ‘the leader of the black avant-garde in Britain’. His written work and performance moves between surrealism, experiments with language and form, Jazz and the rhythms of Caribbean speech and music. He is the author of four poetry collections and a novel The African Origins of UFOs. In 2005 he was selected by the Arts Council of England and Renaissance One as one of 50 Black and Asian writers who have made major contributions to contemporary British literature. In 2012 he represented Trinidad at the Poetry Parnassus Festival on London’s South Bank. He performs internationally and tours with his band The Spasm Band with which he has released four critically acclaimed albums. His fifth album Time was produced by Meshell Ndgeocello and will be released in Spring 2014.Fran Lock is a sometime itinerant dog whisperer and poet, now living and working in London. Her debut collection Flatrock (Little Episodes) was launched in May 2011. Her work has appeared in various places, including Ambit, Poetry London, The Stinging Fly, and in Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt).Graham Mort, poet and short fiction writer, is Professor of Creative Writing and Transcultural Literature at Lancaster University. He specialises in literature development work and recent projects have taken him to South Africa, Kurdistan, Vietnam and China. His first book of stories, Touch (Seren), won the Edge Hill Prize in 2011 and his latest book of stories, Terroir (Seren), is currently long-listed for the same prize. A new book of poems, Black Shiver Moss, will appear from Seren in 2017.Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, formerly Chair of the Poetry Society and currently Resident Poet at Christ’s College, Cambridge. She has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Darwin: A Life in Poems. Her non-fiction includes a nature/travel book on wild tigers, much acclaimed for its description of Asian forest landscapes from Bhutan to Sumatra. The first section of The Poem and the Journey, her most recent book on reading contemporary poetry, turns on the landscape in which we find our first identity, and is prefaced by Viola’s question in Twelfth Night, ‘What country, friends, is this?’ Website: www.ruthpadel.com.Claire Trévien was born in 1985 in Brittany. She is a poet, critic and literary translator. Her writing has been published in a wide variety of literary magazines including Under The Radar, Poetry Salzburg Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Warwick Review, Nth Position, and Fuselit. Earlier this year she published an e-chapbook of poetry with Silkworms Ink called Patterns of Decay. She is the editor of Sabotage Reviews and Noises Off. She was the winner of Leaf Book's 2010 Nano-Fiction Competition.Mark Waldron’s first book, The Brand New Dark was published by Salt Publishing in 2008. His work appears in Identity Parade, New British and Irish Poets published by Bloodaxe in 2010. He lives in east London with his wife and son.

• Foreword by Roddy LumsdenIntroduction by Sasha DugdaleFleur Adcock “Bees’ Nest”Patience Agbabi “Unfinished Business”Tara Bergin “Stag-Boy”Liz Berry “Sow”Alison Brackenbury “Roll-on”Vahni Capildeo “Four Departures from ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’”Melanie Challenger “Suilven or Humility”Amarjit Chandan “The Prisoner Being Released”Gillian Clarke “Swans”John Wedgwood Clarke “Sandside”John Clegg “Mermaids”David Constantine “A Local Habitation”Sarah Corbett “An English Walk”Abi Curtis “Purpose-Built Town”Amy De’Ath “Failure”Christine de Luca “Discontinuity”Michael Egan “intermission”Elaine Feinstein “Damage”Jane Flett “This Cowgirl’s Lament”John Gallas “from pacifications”John Gohorry “from Keeping the City”Andrew Greig “Wynd”Vona Groarke “Midsummer”Jo Haslam “Hart”Michael Haslam “Old Lad”Paul Henry “Usk”Selima Hill “The Elephant Whose Sturgeon-like Blood”Sheila Hillier “Re-entry”Sarah Howe “Death of Orpheus”Joanna Ingham “The Corpse Road”Anthony Joseph “River Dove”Annie Katchinska “Tawpie”David Kinloch “from I, Giraffe”Janet Kofi-Tsekpo “The Arch”Tim Liardet “Deleted Scene (The Frog)”Frances Leviston “A Shrunken Head”Fran Lock “from The Mystic and The Pig Thief”Richie McCaffery “Ballast Flint”Karen McCarthy Woolf “Old Mutha Riah. Hoxton 1935”Jamie McKendrick “King Billy’s Nemesis”Michael McKimm “Water Cure”Hugh McMillan “Too Big a Part”Kathryn Maris “What Will Happen To The Neighbours When The Earth Floods?”Hilary Menos “Bob’s Dogs”Harriet Moore “Bog Bodies”Kim Moore “The Drowned Fields”David Morley “Ballad of the Moon, Moon”Graham Mort “Passed”Stephanie Norgate “Free style”Bernard O’Donoghue “Sardines”Richard Owens “Immigrant Song”Ruth Padel “Ripples on New Grass”Alasdair Paterson “Pomegranate”Anita Pati “An unborn child wonders if it’s worth it”Eleanor Perry “Sole”Pascale Petit “Notre Dame Father”Jacob Polley “Lunarian”Caroline Price “After”Anne Rouse “High Wall”Kathryn Simmonds “Experience”Zoe Skoulding “The Man in the Moone”Anne Stevenson “How astonishing”Greta Stoddart “The Curtain”Claire Trevien “Sing Bird”Mark Waldron “The Life Cycle of the Fly”Rory Waterman “Marstrand”Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch “Delft”Yang Lian “Questions about the Demon Taotie”Jane Yeh “The Birds”Contributors’ Notes And CommentsList Of MagazinesAcknowledgements

... it possesses greater energy and range than the annual Forward Book of Poetry, as evidenced in poems by Gillian Allnutt, Amy De'Ath, and Chris McCabe, among others.