{"title":"Fair Acre Press","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781911048336","title":"Thaw","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhen a thunderstorm’s dark reverberations glimmer ‘in the night-sky of the head’, or when apricots generate an edible appreciation of ‘soft time’, we discover Charles Bennet’s lyrical and powerful poems revealing the impact of nature in memorable, unexpected and sometimes unusual ways.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis fascinating collection concerns itself with forms of melting: fluid interfaces between natural and human environments. Beginning and ending in gardens, it explores aspects of experience informed and affected by close observation. Time and again, whether in the form of a blackbird’s tuneful message, a seashell’s glossy interior, or the smell of fresh rain, our relationship with ecology is reinvigorated. Delighted, rapturous and occasionally disturbing, this is a collection enthralled by the sensual delights of the natural world and its creatures.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"‘should we \/ have been listening more \/ and listening harder?’ Charles Bennett wonders in ‘Planting Apricots’.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut it’s difficult to imagine poems that listen more closely than these to the ‘green music’ of the natural world.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt play is a sensibility which – alert to happenstance and to the lives of plants and creatures – willingly finds a common ground that furnishes moments of quiet transcendence.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe vivid precision of the image-making attests to the thoughtful rigour of this poet’s attention.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA sow was never before  ‘like a lake of treacle’ but will always be so now.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e Katharine Towers\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308892729717,"sku":"9781911048336","price":5.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781911048336_74554ac6-7521-47db-bdea-399d504957d9.jpg?v=1786029664"},{"product_id":"9781911048367","title":"From Rowan Ridge","description":"\u003cp\u003ePoetry - On place\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAll my life I have had a strong affinity for the rivers and hills of Mid-Wales’ borderland. Sometimes I played with other children but, at the age of two, my best friend was the Pinsley stream which flowed past our house and, at that time, on through the centre of Leominster town. Street games with their rules, requirements to conform and domination by older kids weren’t as exciting as going exploring upstream.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe stream was a gentler, much more generous, companion which introduced me to a myriad of creatures and plants.\u003cbr\u003eI felt a close kinship with nature and seldom wanted to go indoors or into town. I learned to read the river: safe shallows and shingles, the treachery of silt and still deeps.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen I had to start school I suffered terrible separation anxiety. A sand tray and plasticine were poor substitutes for mud and cow pats. It took me a long time to acclimatise to captivity and human-only company. Though I did make friends, I was delighted to get back to the river, the frogs, mayflies and moorhens.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs I grew, Mum became increasingly housebound so I found myself becoming her scout reporting on everything I saw on my explorations. My territory was also her childhood territory. She helped me to identify places to visit, and she created a love of observing and naming birds and wild flowers. Her father took her upstream when he fished the Pinsley and Lugg and I shared his passion for water meadows. My aunt once said to my mother, “Do you think she’s our dad come back to us?” I longed to be able to fish\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003elike him but no one left in the family had any expertise. Occasionally I was given a brown trout or grayling to cheer Mum up.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMy father came from Germany and whenever we visited I got very homesick. That was watery border country too but indistinguishable from Holland: flat and ruled by straight roads, straight trees and dykes. The best bits were playing with my cousins on bomb sites under cover of wild spinach and rose bay willowherb. I craved the hills, meanders, twisting hedges and broken-backed willows of home.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen we were travelling home in 1963, Dad read Beeching's railway cuts aloud from the paper.\u003cbr\u003eThe Leominster-to-Kington line that ran past us was to go.\u003cbr\u003eI was 7 and panicked. I thought we'd never get home and I'd have to live in a flat, intensively plotted, place. I pined in anticipation of the loss of wildness and the suffocating weight of sky in the absence of hills.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEven Herefordshire began to feel too low-lying and farmed. Town was encroaching on country. If there was a chance of a rare car trip I always wanted to go west to the Radnor Forest, to Knighton and Presteigne, places imbued with stories of grandfather as a boy staying up all night in Stapleton Castle to stalk its ghost; sometimes we visited grandmother's childhood homes in the hills around Bishops Castle and at the back of the Long Mynd. Topography talked to me. I loved the rounded, unenclosed hills of bilberry and bracken and hiding in secret cwms.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn the way to Barmouth when I was nine, we travelled the hill road from Knighton to Newtown. I made my uncle stop the car on the moors by Cilfaesty Hill, near the source of the Teme and was enthralled. As we dipped down past the then derelict Cider House, on the back of Kerry hill, at the place I now think of as Rowan Ridge, I spotted a raven leaning into the north and knew, instantly, that I wanted to live nearby.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChris Kinsey, 2019\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308893057397,"sku":"9781911048367","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781911048367_7ade1ae7-2896-4e09-94f3-bca1ea4bd616.jpg?v=1786029664"},{"product_id":"9781911048503","title":"A Spell in The Woods","description":"\u003cp\u003eStella Wulf's \u003cem\u003eA Spell in the Woods\u003c\/em\u003e contains powerful, compelling poems of natural observation: of seeing and listening to the world around us and recreating their second life in language.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDavid Morley\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn A\u003cem\u003e Spell in the Woods\u003c\/em\u003e, Stella Wulf shows herself to be a worthy successor to Ted Hughes, Mary Oliver and Andrew Young. As a pictorial artist we might not be surprised that she has such a clear-eyed focus upon the natural world, but what an ear she has as well! These are poems that need to be read aloud, and repeatedly, to savour their intricate harmonies. Seemingly timeless, they are all too urgently contemporary in a world we are polluting with 'the silt of entitlement, a flood of insouciance.'\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDavid Cooke\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309009842549,"sku":"9781911048503","price":7.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781911048503_4742d55e-2d3a-4e44-82e1-1ed2053db37f.jpg?v=1786029665"},{"product_id":"9781911048312","title":"The Matt Hazard","description":"\u003cp\u003eCartoons for grown ups\u003cbr\u003eMeet Matt Hazard - an ordinary man trying not to be defined by his job\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEndorsed by Hunt Emerson\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAbout the Mattoonist\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePaul “kieltyascharged” Kielty is an Irishman living in the midlands of England.\u003cbr\u003ePaul worked for many years, first on the factory floor, then rising to the dizzying heights of foreman before jacking it all in to follow every Irishman’s dream – to leave their beloved country. His excuse was that he was offered an animation degree at the University of Wolverhampton.\u003cbr\u003eHe started an M.A. but holding 2 jobs down (Animation technician, and warehousing) to pay the rent and university fees finally meant he took up warehousing\/ labouring\/ factory work full time, once more... though always dabbling in Stand-up comedy, M.C.-ing at burlesque nights, singer-songwriting and recording, drawing, painting, and developing his origami skills in his spare time.\u003cbr\u003e2018 sees him “coming out” as an artist – with this, his first book of MATTOONS – and a high-end visual art exhibition in Qube gallery, Oswestry, August 2018.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309009908085,"sku":"9781911048312","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781911048312_3b4842e3-7a09-47e7-bd5e-5eda067c221d.jpg?v=1786029662"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/publisher-fair-acre-press.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}