In 1996, Iain Sinclair, briefly surveying ‘what has mattered over the last thirty years'’, mentions John Temple as one of two ‘fine poets who haven’t published for some time’. This collection envisages poem, sequence, book as (each and together) ‘a form cut into time’.

In Michael Murphy’s new annotated edition of Kenneth Allott’s Collected Poems all Allott’s previously published work is combined with eighteen new poems, some of which have only recently come to light. The whole collection is introduced and annotated by Murphy and now represents the most complete picture of Allott, a man widely regarded as one of most exciting poets of the late Thirties.

Complete Twentieth Century Blues is the definitive edition of a network of texts written and assembled as a time-based project between 1989 and the end of the last century. At its heart is an alternative history of the twentieth century. This long-awaited volume is revised throughout, fully indexed, and with many previously unpublished texts.

The Contrivances of this book occupy four sites: ‘Saccades’ gouged out by sexual pain and loss; ‘Signs of an Intruder’ introduces the light of Tuscany to a secure unit; ‘The Still-Piercing Air’ is sited on the banks of the Thames; and ‘Case in Point’ turns about fetish objects often withheld from view.

Set in the West, Russia, Moldova and the Middle East, Katia Kapovich’s Cossacks and Bandits explores the personal histories of survivors of sociopolitical and economic distress, who are the true modern hero and heroine. In the final reckoning, survival and dignity depend on creative thinking and a leap of the imagination.

This collection engages with traditional forms and carries out various kinds of experimentation centering on the physical meaning of life. The poems confront issues of cognitive, spiritual and erotic experience, and address longing and desire in the material world. The Creature yearns for new language in which we can all more truly live.

This triology of poetry manuscripts includes poems that add personal emotion and interest into what has become quite dry experimental poetry, and visual and sonic interest back into melodramatic narrative / confessional modes. While its main appeal is to play and pleasure, this verse may prove challenging for beginning readers of poetry while it will interest those who generally do not read poetry but read classics, science & technology, experimental fiction, criticism / critical theory, and philosophy.

The Basquiat of contemporary writing, Ronnie McGrath’s DATA TRACE is a collection of innovative poetry that sheds light on the changing nature of a poet’s identity and his experience of growing up in Britain. It is an earnest look at the ‘self’ as raced and un-raced, sexualised and un-sexualised, gendered and yet stripped to the bone of an impossibility to define ‘self’ in a fast and forever changing world.