Publication Day for ROSE BRIDE, written as Elizabeth Moss

Can Margerie ever escape her wrongful reputation as a courtesan? ROSE BRIDE: out now

The final title in the Lust in the Tudor Court series: scorching Tudor erotica for fans of Sylvia Day, The Tudors and Philippa Gregory's White Queen.

She is a fallen woman, an object of men's lust...

Margerie Croft yielded up her virginity before her wedding, and then fled from her eager suitor - knowing that she could not marry a man she did not love. Now she is viewed as soiled goods, fit for only for the role of courtier's plaything.

He sees something in her that others don't...

Virgil Elton is King Henry VIII's physician, working on a tonic to restore his sovereign's flagging libido. But first it must be tested. Who better, then, than the wanton Margerie Croft? But as he gets to know her Virgil discovers someone as intelligent and passionate as she is beautiful - someone who has been gravely misunderstood.

For her part, Margerie finds Virgil irresistible - with or without the help of his special medicine. But she knows she could never make Virgil a respectable wife. And yet, despite herself, Margerie can't help but wonder... 

Will they find the formula for a lasting love? 

ROSE BRIDE: available TODAY as an ebook, paperback in July 

Read free sample at Amazon UK

Read free sample at Amazon US

On Warwick Castle: new digital edition

Browse on Amazon UK

Back in 2008, my poems from the Warwick Laureateship were published in pamphlet form by Nine Arches Press. Since that pamphlet 'On Warwick' is now out of print, there is a new digital version available on Kindle only.

Priced at only 77p, this new edition contains the long title poem 'On Warwick Castle', and two other poems commissioned during my stint as Warwick Poet Laureate, 'On the Renovations at Leamington Spa Station 2008' and 'Leamophants', on the history of elephants in Leamington Spa.

'On Warwick Castle': "On Warwick is the product of Jane Holland’s year as Warwick’s Poet Laureate. It’s not unusual for local laureates to write poems about major landmarks of the area, but the main poem in the collection, ‘On Warwick Castle’—described in David Morley’s foreword as Holland’s “modernist piece de resistance”—is probably one of the more ambitious works of public poetry generated through a local laureateship." David Floyd, writing in Sphinx.

High praise indeed!

If looking at this ebook on Amazon, do please click LIKE there if you feel able to. This apparently helps the book's visibility to browsing punters. Thanks!

"How Potatoes Saved The Queen" launches for World Book Day

I'm utterly delighted to announce the launch of my youngest daughter's first publication, an e-book for Amazon Kindle entitled "How Potatoes Saved the Queen".

It's a short collection of Tudor tales for children, based around the fictional character of Potatoes, a rascally Irish wolfhound who has the distinction of being Sir Walter Raleigh's dog.

"The Amazing Adventures of Potatoes, the Tudor dog!"

Potatoes is Sir Walter Raleigh's dog, who named him after his greatest discovery - the potato!

Potatoes is a friendly rascal. But he is also a very brave dog. He has many daring adventures, often saving Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth from certain death.

You can find out about Potatoes' adventures in this short collection of seven easy-to-read exciting stories for younger readers under 10 - and older readers who might like an alternative view of Tudor history.

The author is 8 years old. In 2011, she was the youngest winner of 'The Tick-Tock Box', a national short story competition at The Guardian newspaper judged by Francesca Simon, author of the Horrid Henry books. This is Indigo Haynes' first publication. She is currently writing a fantasy adventure novel for children.

I can verify that Indigo wrote all these stories herself, mostly last year when she was seven years old, plus some other animal stories which are being saved for a later collection. I typed them up and acted as her editor, correcting her spelling and occasional infelicitous sentence structure. Though I have to admit, some particularly amusing word inventions have been left to stand - 'dignant', for instance.

Indigo now considers herself a published author, and is already planning how to spend her royalties. The collection is priced 77p in the UK, and I'm sure would appeal to most young readers. And a few grown-up ones too!

US readers can find "How Potatoes Saved the Queen" here on Amazon Kindle.
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David Morley's "Enchantment"

Off to Warwick University tonight for the official launch of poet David Morley's latest poetry collection from Carcanet: "Enchantment".

And it is an enchanting book, I can highly recommend it.

8pm, Wednesday 19th January, 2011
Venue: The Capital Studio, Millburn House, Warwick University, Coventry, CV4 7HS
Entry: Free

Carcanet Press invites you to the launch of 'Enchantment' by David Morley.

David Morley's 'Enchantment' reinvents the oral tradition of poetry as a form of magic, marvel and making. Opening with a celebration of friendship, the poems tell the world into being. In myths of origin and the natural world, the terrible chronicles of history and the saving power of folk wisdom, the poet weaves spells of Romany and circus language, invents forms and shapes, drawing his readers into a "lit circle" magical and true.

For more information visit www.carcanet.co.uk.

Dove Release: New Flights and Voices

I'll be reading this Thursday night at the launch of the poetry anthology “Dove Release: New Flights and Voices”, edited by David Morley and published by Worple Press, which contains work by poets connected to Warwick University.

The Poets: Toby Aisbitt, Katie Allen, Vicki Benson, Peter Blegvad, Zoë Brigley, James Brookes, Phil Brown, Claire Bunyan, Peter Carpenter, Nick Chen, Swithun Cooper, Nicola Davidson, David Devanny, Rebecca Fearnley, Chloe Todd Fordham, James Harringman, Emily Hasler, Luke Heeley, Jane Holland, Gavin Hudson, Thom Hutchinson, Poppy James, Sholeh Johnston, Charlotte Jones, Luke Kennard, Gwenfron Kent, Will Kerr, Sam Kinchin-Smith, Anna Lea, Emma Lowe, Ailie MacDonald, Liz Manuel, Jack McGowan, Michael McKimm, Jennifer McLean, Glyn Maxwell, Peter Maxwell, Jennifer Mellor, David Morley, Jon Morley, John Murray, Ruth Padel, Kathryn Parratt, Siavash Pournouri, Sarah Rabone, Rowan Rutter, Fiona Sampson, Nima David Seifi, Sam Sedgeman, Nicola Seth-Smith, Bethany Startin, George Szirtes, Cari Thomas, Claire Trévien, George Ttoouli, Simon Turner, Jonathan Ware, Hilary Watson and Andrew Webb.

The launch takes place on Thursday 18th March starting 8.00 p.m. in The Capital Centre, University of Warwick. Star poets at this event include David Morley, Glyn Maxwell, Luke Kennard, Jane Holland and Peter Blegvad. Peter will also be MC’ing the launch with readings from students. Drinks in the foyer from 7.15pm.

Free but a ticketed event.

Tom Chivers' "The Terrors"

Tom Chivers is a poet based in London, who has just published a pamphlet of poem-emails entitled THE TERRORS. To give you a flavour of his content, here's the short preface:

What follows is a sequence of imagined emails sent from the author to inmates at London's Newgate Prison incarcerated between roughly 1700 and 1760. All mistakes, typos and anachronisms are deliberate.

Tom Chivers promises - and delivers - anachronisms in these well-presented 30-odd pages of poems - poem-emails, prose-poems, email-musings - with an urban twist well-suited to such disturbing subject matter. For instance, in an email to Babs_Spencer@yahoo.co.uk, Chivers addresses the unfortunate Barbara, who appears to have been imprisoned for forgery, as though they are personal friends. 'Thank god you were throttled before you were burnt', he writes, then leaps straight into another stanza: 'The burger vans hum as I wait for the nightbus, onions caramelising on the grill, faggots and all.'

This is contemporary elegy, then, for the long-dead, the unknown, many of them victims of a clumsy, unjust and barbaric legal system.

Geoffrey Hill in his Mercian Hymns phase is, surely, an influence in these poems, structurally at least, if not in tone as well. This is from one of several emails to William Dodd :

I snared the gaping crowd, Will; told Akerman you once danc'd into the living grave wherin we're food for worms. I'd love to see your homely porter, clad in bespoke skin of wolsey grey; strange choirs, guttural outpourings.

I'm what you'd call a fellow traveller; terrestrial stranger with my twin-pack scriptures, ghostly doctrine tagged along the walls. Watch for the pattern and the source, you said.

The pattern: infamy!
The source: infamy!

But not all these email-poems run along such expansive, discursive lines. Some are elegant with impressive one-liners - 'The Chinese say a person with a bad name is already half-hanged' - while others try a different tack, short clauses and place names run together in mini-sentences, creating a breathless, accusatory charge into the past:

Hooded in a whimple. Skirts up to here. It was you, wasn't it?
Gun Street. Spitalfields. Drab or tom.
Findy sides open to the fog. Bundle of kid.

Even though some of these poems are difficult to read, and must have been even worse to write, Tom Chivers does not shy away from the unsettling or the genuinely horrific detail in these quasi-historical accounts; indeed, his outraged sense of injustice permeates THE TERRORS. Here are the opening lines of 'To: Elizabeth Brownrigg/Subject: Murder by inches':

1. The subject is tied up naked, beaten with a hearth-broom, a horsewhip, or a cane, til she is speechless.

Some of the rest of this poem is so horrific, I don't feel able to quote it here. But it conveys, swiftly and eloquently, the atmosphere of Newgate Prison in the eighteenth century, or how we, looking back on such times from the present, can only believe or fear it must have been for the inmates.

Nine Arches Press is to be congratulated for publishing this short collection by Tom Chivers, which is both innovative and disturbing, and which gives a voice to the voiceless, albeit an imagined, anachronistic one. I was extremely pleased to be present at the launch a few weeks ago in London, and to be able to read alongside Tom. Hearing his introductions, and the poems themselves, left me keen to review such a fascinating, experimental collection.

If I had one minor criticism to make, it would be that, on reading these poems, I felt curious to know more about the people to whom they were addressed, including crimes they had been accused of and how they were sentenced. But it's only a minor point, and perhaps a list in an appendix could be added in a later edition.

THE TERRORS is a bold, dark, and deeply unsettling collection which introduces a strong new poetic voice in Tom Chivers. You can buy the book online from Nine Arches Press via Throckmortons bookshop (which will directly support this bold new publishing house).

There is also a short poetry film by Tom Chivers reading from THE TERRORS on location at Newgate, available here.

Salt Christmas Party: Friday 12th December

EVERYONE WELCOME at the Salt Publishing Christmas Party

Poetry & Short Story readings from Julia Bird, Jane Holland, Sue Hubbard and Mark Waldron. Fill your Stockings at the Salt Book Stall. Pay Bar. Secret Santa presents for all the good boys and girls!
Friday 12th December 2008
6.30 onwards – readings at 7.30ish and 8.30ish
The Horse Hospital, Colonnade, Bloomsbury,
London WC1N 1HX
Map: Multimap.com

Julia Bird in her debut collection, there is a poem called "Five Years Trying to Win the Flower Show Vegetable Animal Class". Entries include an aubergine bird of paradise, and a potato humpback whale with "eyes for a blowhole, and also for eyes". Like her speaker's perennially highly commended sculptures, Julia Bird's poetry dismantles the everyday and builds it into new shapes. (New Statesman)

Jane Holland's new collection, Camper Van Blues, is a book of journeys, both real and imaginary. The title sequence is a British road movie told through poems, one woman and her dog alone in a camper van, each jump-cut taking the reader further into the interior of an addictive, self-destructive personality. In a sequence of brief and highly visual poems, Holland explores a midnight landscape of motorways, truck stops and lay-bys, touching by turns on the issues of loneliness, drug abuse and living with depression.

From Sue Hubbard's new short story collection Rothko's Red … 'Belle's apartment was above a Chinese restaurant on the Lower East Side, a tiny oriental island in the once largely Jewish neighbourhood. Whilst some of the old sweat shops and tenement buildings with their heavy iron fire escapes had been taken over by young artists, or turned into Tarot reading or tattoo parlours, there was nothing hip about The Lotus Garden with its murky interior, its cheap red lanterns and lurid gilt frames containing dayglo Chinese dragons. The stairway leading from the side door up to Belle's apartment smelt of cats and boiled washing. The visit had been a sudden decision. When the Christmas card with the snow-laden pine branches had arrived, Maggie had, on the spur of the moment, phoned Belle. She needed to get away, put some distance between the sense of rejection and confusion Adam's leaving had stirred in her, and Belle had seemed genuinely pleased …'

"Mark Waldron's poems are generally short, crisp and lyrical, but they are driven by a phantasmagoria of garrulous creatures, spectres and shapeshifters, alter egos and alluring women." (Roddy Lumsden)

This is, I suppose, the official launch of Camper Van Blues, though the book's been on sale a month or so now and I've read from it at various events.

For this Christmas Party launch though, I'll be reading sometime between 7.30pm and 8pm, for those who may be thinking of coming along and would like to catch me 'in the act', as it were. Signed copies will be available!

Leicester Poetry Reading & Magazine Launch coming up

Thursday, 11th December, 2008, doors open 7.30pm, FREE
Friends Meeting House, Queen's Road, Leicester.

Open mic and poetry night to celebrate the launch of Under The Radar issue 2, featuring:

Jane Holland - Editor of Horizon Review, reading from her latest Salt collection, Camper Van Blues.
Matt Merritt - Leicestershire poet, shares poems from his first collection, Troy Town.
Matt Nunn - Birmingham's finest poetic export, reading from his forthcoming collection, Sounds in the Grass.
Jane Commane - Warwickshire-based poet reading a selection of her recent work.

Plus open mic slots available - please arrive early to sign up for a place.
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Again, anyone in the area who can make this reading, I'd be happy to see you. There will be books for sale, and I can personally vouch for the fact that Matt Nunn is very funny!

Ride the Word: New Writing from Salt hits London

At the Godiva Festival: Cov's answer to Glastonbury!

I performed on stage last night at the Godiva Festival in Coventry's Memorial Park, two tents down from Cov's favourite band, The Enemy. I also happened to be in the Artist Liaison tent, getting my free food voucher, at the same time as some of the young band members and their families were picking up their backstage passes. My teenage daughter, who's a big fan of The Enemy, now apparently 'hates' me for not arranging a backstage pass for her too!

It was an excellent reading to a massive and appreciative crowd - if a bit 'Glastonbury' at times, thanks to the heavy rain, mud slicks everywhere, and an electrical short in the generator part-way through the unfortunate performer's set immediately before mine. There was a ten minute pause, while people danced about in the noisy semi-darkness and slow-clapped, then the lights came back on and suddenly it was my turn at the mic.

I warmed up the crowd, now rather frisky, with two short poems from my next book, Camper Van Blues (Salt Publishing, 2008): 'Day Tripping', about drug abuse, and 'Neighbours' (just published in Mimesis 4) about the downside of being a lone female traveller.

I then read two pieces from my first collection of poetry, The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman (Bloodaxe, 1997): 'Baize Queens', about my days as a semi-pro snooker player, and 'Not a Love Poem'.

To finish the ten minute set, I read my party piece - an extract from The Lament of the Wanderer, my version of the Anglo-Saxon poem, just published as a chapbook by Coventry's Heaventree Press, who were hosting last night's event.

Other readers in the poetry tent included the great Linton Kwesi Johnson and such stalwarts of the British poetry circuit as Dreadlockalien (aka Richard Grant), Mario Petrucci, Kei Miller, Mike McKimm, Yusra Warsama, Coventry's own Scrubber Jack, plus two excellent Irish poets visiting from Cork, Paul Casey and Billy Ramsell.