Celebrating New Books

"The Wildest Dream" by David Gee; "home is a place that visits me" by Hannah Hull; and an invitation to join me - online and in-person - for the launch of "The Book of Bogs".

It’s Clare here, welcoming some new books into the world.

On Tuesday night, I travelled to the London launch of “The Wildest Dream: an imagined history of the Green Man” by the much-missed David Gee (Ember Press 2025). It was strange to be at a launch when the author was absent; strange to celebrate when grief was such a strong presence in the room. But the beauty of the book still shone, and listening to it, I remembered- for the first time in these tumultuous weeks - something of the calm I found on the Coast to Coast, something about how words can lead the way into brighter, wider places. “Green without, green within”, said David, finding wildness not just in mountains and rivers, but also in tap water, weather, small acts of love and care. Fitting then that his final book – finished just weeks before his far-too-soon-death – should be an act of community, crowdfunded and published by people who loved him and his work, with half of all proceeds donated to Asylum Welcome.

Later today (Friday 26^th) I’ll be at the launch of “Home is a Place that Visits Me” (Arachne Press, 2025), the first collection from artist Hannah “Hunter” Hull. I use the term “collection” guardedly because, like Hunter, the book evades categorisation. It’s a picture book, a short story, a tiny memoir, a fairy tale and a nightmare, a work of art, a prose poem, a short film, an exhibition … all taking place within sixty-four pages of illustrated poetry. In fact, I first encountered it on the walls of an art gallery. I was there because of Hunter’s music, having overheard the ache of their deep lyrical songs as they rehearsed … I was watching bees in the garden when Hunter called from the window and invited me to their first solo exhibition, and the rest is story, if not history.

Too many art events are described as immersive just because they are loud or bright, but Hunter’s show – was art that crawled and bled and shone and sang, drawings with tiny voices and a hundred stories, a small, handsome human who filled the room bright as a full moon and a voice that could fill a concert hall, a dark cathedral of a voice, songs that doubled me over. And then the book. Just one copy of it - an art book containing the text and drawings in sequence. When Hannah sings I think everyone should listen, but I can’t make that happen. However, I did contact Hannah to say – that book deserves to be read widely. It tells a story I want to be told – described as a “poetic narrative of the home, childhood trauma and the family” – and it tells it with such depth, such commitment to evoking and communicating simply and powerfully the multiplicity and complexity of those experience, such playful and heartbreaking creativity, that in effect, it creates a new language, a poetic interplay between image and word which is so much more than the sum of its parts.

Take this page, for example.

Ow. The flattened tone is deliberate, sustained, and very effective – evoking as it does the impact of trauma, the normalising of dysfunction and pain. And the book, like the hauntings it describes, speaks through a howling absence, which is sometimes heightened and sometimes filled by the imagery. It’s as if, in the texture of those disturbingly, artfully, childlike drawings, we hear the Hunter’s thoughts, or feel the texture of their hand, or glimpse their memories. The image makes real that checking under the bed, however obsessively, was never going to keep those monsters away; just as the poetry shows us that telling the ghost “I don’t believe in you” is a desperate failure of logic: it will not work.

There’s the lightest of light touches here as well, however desperate the topic, a sort of playful cynicism:

“The psychiatrist said it was chemical imbalance.

The psychologist said it was trauma

The acupuncturist said it was blocked chi.

The shaman said it was soul loss.

God said he’d run out of stories that people wanted to believe”.

Ultimately, the book seems to be an argument for speaking out – “learn to scream” - and in that sense, follows a well-established and vital path. I think of all the poets of survival and witness, including myself, and of course Kim … with image and music, Hunter brings something else to that tradition. If you’d like to see me in conversation with Hunter at the sold-out Todmorden launch of the book today, you can join the queue or the waiting list and hope. Or you can catch Hannah in Stroud at the Indie Press Network Poetry Salon on 4^th Oct - or join the FREE online launch on 7^th October. If you buy the book at one of these launch events, you get a complimentary code so that you can download the painfully brilliant 17-track album, close to home.

If you, like Hannah, have tough truths to tell, then this two-part Writing School Workshop workshop - ”Unstopper the Unsayable” with the incredible Shivanee Ramlochan - looks unsurpassable. With two two-hour afternoon workshops taking place online on 28th Sept and 5th Oct, the blurb reads, “you have a candle in one shaking hand, and you’re in the dark mansion of your own mind. There’s a poem trapped behind a door you cannot budge: what will you use to set it free?”

And if that wasn’t enough, today also saw the arrival of “The Book of Bogs: Stories from a Yorkshire Moor and other Peatlands”, published by Little Toller and edited by Anna Chilvers and I - and the subject of my 9th October live online event for our paying Substack subscribers. As well as talking about the experience of creating a major anthology, I’ll be reading work from it - poetry from David Morley, Pascale Petit, Gwynneth Lewis, Ian Humphreys, Patti Smith and more, with perhaps a story or two from Anna Chilvers, Clare Shaw, even Kim Moore! I’ll send more information, including joining instructions, to our paying subscribers in the coming week – and for those lovely people who have pre-ordered a copy of the book, expect to receive it soon.

But even better - here’s an invite to join me and up to 20 of the book’s authors in person at the book’s official launch in the historic Brontë School Rooms in Haworth on Sat 4^th October from 6.30pm. There will be celebration and jollity, and readings by the UK’s leading nature-and-place writers including Amy Liptrot, Alys Fowler and Polly Atkin, and there will be crisps. Tickets are a mere £5, and are available here.

See you soon!