Grey Suit Editions

Authors

Donald Gardner

Donald Gardner has been writing poetry since the early 1960s. Recent collections include The Wolf Inside (2014) and The Glittering Sea (2006), both published by Hearing Eye. He is also a translator of poetry and his selection of Remco Campert’s poetry, In those Days (Shoestring 2014) was awarded the Vondel Prize for literary translation. Born in London, he divides his time between Amsterdam and Kildare.

Alan Jenkins

Alan Jenkins has published six volumes of poetry, the most recent of which are A Shorter Life (2005) and Revenants (2013). He edited the Collected Poems of Ian Hamilton (2009). White Nights, a volume of his translations from French, will appear in 2015. He has taught in Paris and the United States but has lived for most of his life in London, where he works as Deputy Editor and Poetry Editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

Praise for Alan Jenkins:

"One sometimes thinks that the personal past, those childhood reveries and glints of sunlight on far-off summer lawns that FR Leavis so detested in the work of Edith Sitwell, is about all the modern English poet has left - that, and a fatal habit of parading his influences to the point where what gets written is often only a variation on an existing text. To suggest that the dominant note of Alan Jenkins's new collection is elegiac is not, in the end, to say a great deal, either about his poems, Jenkins himself or even his development as a writer. In the Hot-house (1988), his first outing - this is the fifth - came crammed with exactly the same kind of aching reminiscence: maternal shadows in the Eden-era nursery, the "flushed, unfussed, unreluctant, dapper" figure of Jenkins senior, the rueful acknowledgment of influence, the sail-boat nosing along a pre-lapsarian Thames. All these - taken out, dusted down and re-examined - contribute something to A Shorter Life's prevailing air of lamp-eyed brooding." The Guardian

"Late in this American debut by the British poet Alan Jenkins, the speaker asks himself, "Are you still that suburban / boy who dreamed of taking opium with Baudelaire / or wine with Byron?" Yes and no, the middle-aged poet seems to answer. Throughout this stylish, bitingly autobiographical collection, selected from four previous volumes dating to the late 1980s, we see how Jenkins's early idealism has been transformed by the passage of time. What remains constant is his cool, velvety use of traditional prosody and forms." The New York Times

"A Shorter Life, Alan Jenkins's fifth and best collection, finds the poet less than impressed with his behaviour. The court of the self proves implacable. It is not enough to confess: there has to be judgement, too, in the form of ineradicable self-knowledge. Confession is the mode of the American Robert Lowell of whom there are faint echoes here, while much of Jenkins's imaginative furniture is French: how interesting, then, that at times he should so strongly recall Philip Larkin who did not like Abroad but had clearly read its poets all the same." The Independent

 

Fawzi Karim

Born in Baghdad in 1945 and now living in London, Fawzi Karim is an influential and much-loved poet of an exiled generation of Iraqi intellectuals who escaped Baathist censorship. Karim's sense of exile began long before his arrival in London, when he found himself alienated by the ideological movements sweeping across his country. He has since established a reputation as a major figure in contemporary poetry. Plague Lands, first book of poems in translation, was awarded a Poetry Book Society recommendation in 2011 and has been described as an elegy for the life of a lost city, a chronicle of a journey into exile and the deep history of an ancient civilisation. 

Kerry-Lee Powell

Kerry-Lee Powell was born in Canada and grew up in Antigua, Australia and the United Kingdom, where she studied Medieval and Renaissance LIterature at Cardiff University. Her work has appeared in The Spectator, Ambit and The Virago Press Writing Women Series. She has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and a National Magazine Award. In 2013, she won The Boston Review's Aura Estrada ficiton contest and The Malahat Review's Far Horizons prize for short fiction. Her poetry manuscript was awarded the Alfred G. Bailey prize. A full poetry collection will be published by Biblioasis Press in Canada in 2014. A short story collection and a novel are forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2015.

Pamela (Jody) Stewart

Pamela (Jody) Stewart lives on a farm in western Massachusetts with seven dogs and some other beings. Her most recent full-length book of poems is "Ghost Farm" (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010). Other collections include "The Red Window" (The University of Georgia Press, 1997). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, and Black Warrior Review.

Praise for Ghost Farm:

It's wonderful to have new poems by Jody Stewart, deeply internal and intensely lyrical, while at the same time stitched with the thread of myth, story-telling and country lore. These are sensuous, wise, and consoling poems. --Tony Hoagland

To open Pamela Stewart's The Ghost Farm is to enter another world - invisible but wondrous. There, moonlight shines at noon and when 'sheep jump, their fleeces fall away,' ready for carding. A strange messenger tries to rescue the sun buried in a tree at forest's edge. These poems have the crystalline elegance of folklore, yet Stewart also meticulously details the dailiness of life on a farm. The Ghost Farm embodies a profound wisdom drawn from working closely with animals, surviving cancer, and living 'more flesh.' Stewart's poetic ear dazzles - and, oh, the glorious vision! Pamela Stewart is among our finest living poets. --Cynthia Hogue

Rosanne Wasserman