PALEWELL PRESS

Kathy Miles is a poet who writes about the interaction between human and animal worlds. The poems in Vanishing Point draw on surreal images but never lose touch with close observation of people, creatures and landscape.  As Gillian Clarke said of Kathy: “her poems are layered with myth, history, personal experience... the real enriched by myth, and myth deepened by the essential realism of the poet’s vision.”

Living in West Wales, near enough to the sea to be enveloped in its mists and moods, Kathy is a previous winner of the Bridport Prize. In this, her fifth collection, a number of poems grew out of a close family bereavement. But their elegiac bereft quality echoes the grief many of us feel at climate change and other humanity-driven impacts on the environment.

Roz Doe holds an MSc in Forced Migration and has been working with young refugees and asylum seekers for over 20 years. In 2004, she co-founded the charity, Young Roots, which worked with young refugees in Lebanon, Egypt and Nepal and currently provides services for young people living in London. The poems in Welcoming Blue Robins were inspired by young refugees she worked with and the pamphlet also contains poems written by and with young refugees in London. 

Sue Wallace-Shaddad's pamphlet poetry collection, Once There Was Colour, charts the impact of the current crisis situation in Sudan and how it has affected the poet and her family. These poems tell the stories we rarely hear - the realities of life on the ground during unrest, the inability to reach loved ones, and - despite our best efforts - the impotence created by distance. An important read for our times.

Words That Walk Through Walls is a remarkable dialogue between Turkey’s longest-serving student prisoner and some of the finest poets in Europe, New Zealand and the United States. This is a book of poems for and with İlhan Sami Çomak, who is a Kurdish writer and prisoner of conscience who has been held in a Turkish prison for more than thirty years and is still detained at the time of writing.

The poems in Heronless are strongly influenced by the deaths of Sophia's parents. They fuse personal grief with the sense of loss many of us experience due to the climate crisis. This pamphlet is a stunning, beautiful expression of love, loss, the haunting of grief and memory.

Each poem in Kim Whysall-Hammond's pamphlet collection, Messages from the Road, has a motorway sign as its title. She uses these messages to jump into narratives about love, loss, grief, childhood memories, joy, journeys in all weathers and journeys into the human condition. 

So Manu Unavoidable Journeys is a short prose anthology about refugee journeys, emotional as well as physical, from where a person once lived to settling into a new home. Writing about travellers from Bhutan, Iraq, Eritrea, Iran, Bangladesh, Syria, Palestine and Russia, authors with personal knowledge help us understand how it feels to be compelled to migrate.

The writing in Hold to Record - Voice Notes from Refugees grew out of the Voice Notes international creative writing and sound arts project, exploring the role of the telephone call for those who have experienced forced displacement. Featuring messages from twelve refugees and asylum seekers from around the world, the anthology offers new ways to think about displaced voices, creative networks and different modes of talking and listening across cultures.