Poetry Publishing in the UK - A Passionate Conversation
June 30, 2026 Reading time: 7 minutes
A picture of my publisher, Sheila Wakefield, who hates having her photograph taken, with, from left to right, my grand-daughter, who sang for us, Sheila herself, me, and fellow Red Squirrel poet Anne Connolly, at the launch of Comrades of Dark Night last month.
This post was first published in InterLitQ, during the pandemic. The blog, which published so much good stuff for so long, has since been lost, but my publisher, Red Squirrel Press, is celebrating twenty years in business this year, so it seems timely to post it here. It focuses on the publishing of poetry, why we do it and how we set about it. I had begun editing a new poet and her work threw up a lot of questions that I hadn’t thought to ask much before now. Usually poets have an idea in mind, a title, a preferred selection of poems they want to include, or at least a concept of their work as ‘a book’, whether it is a twenty-page pamphlet or a full collection of around sixty pages of poems. But twice now, I have edited poets who don’t do this at all. When asked to submit poems for publishing, they seem to think, ‘oh, that’s nice’, turn in a lot of poems, and wait for the thing to appear as if on a conveyor belt. And I’ve heard of at least one publisher who does that very thing, which as a poet and not an editor, would freak me out.
A lot depends on why you want to be published at all. One of my poets wanted her work in a permanent form to have something to give her children, and I’ve heard several others say something similar. Others are poets who specialise in spoken word, and want a bit of merchandise to sell at gigs, because performing rarely involves being paid directly. In both cases, what is meant by ‘publishing’ is ‘creating a book’, transforming what has been up until now the workings of one’s own mind into a concrete object, as if appearing in a book makes it real. I have to confess that I have a great deal of sympathy with this feeling, especially as the craft of making books as objects turns out to be fascinating - an insight for which I have to thank my publisher Red Squirrel Press, and master typesetter and designer Gerry Cambridge, who does all the Red squirrel Press designs.
Many poets, however, have other aims. A recent poll on Twitter was quite revealing on this, mainly because the question of ‘validation’ didn’t seem to come up as much as I might have expected. So many editors and magazine publishers are plagued with the kind of submitters who become abusive if their work is rejected, that I had assumed a fair degree of narcissism in poets who want to be published. It turns out, at least among poets who took the query seriously, that poets who actively want to publish (as opposed to those rare ones who see their writing as essentially private, like the central character of Paterson,) have various aims in view. Some have something to say on a topic and feel that publishing their poetry is the most effective way to go about it. Others want to submit their work to the judgement of their peers. One said that she had received so much joy from reading the poetry of others that she wanted to give other readers a similar pleasure. But most had variations on the idea that poetry is a conversation, and they wanted to be part of it.
This idea of publishing as a conversation is one I am very taken with. As an editor, I’m not trying to mould my poets into creators of perfect works of art. I want to help people to perfect their own voice, to help them say more clearly what they are wanting to tell, and in a way where it will be heard without misunderstanding or distraction. Publishing poetry isn’t a huckster kind of activity, a megaphone blaring your point of view into a void, or a cacophony of people shouting over everyone else to make money, it’s a reciprocal relationship, listening and reading as much as you write, learning and finding your peer group and your community as much as your place in the pecking order.
Which doesn’t mean that there isn’t marketing and promoting to be done. Most of us are on social media, or try to read at events where we can promote our wares, and some of us are more skilled and active than others. But publishers themselves have a great part to play. A good publisher who turns out beautifully produced books will have a circulation much wider than the kind of print on demand work that a poet can produce alone. I was at a group meeting of small independent publishers lately, and it’s clear that there is a lot of skill and hard work put into giving new poets their chance to make their work known, and for very little return, at least in financial terms. Most small publishers aim simply to cover their costs, and their own living comes from public funding or related paid work which will subsidise their press.
So why do they do it? Some are poets themselves, and recognise that there will be no poetry conversation if they don’t create a way to start it. Some love the book making process, and want to create beautiful objects. Others love poetry and want to be involved in making good work available. Some know that there are good poets who deserve to be published and are dedicated to getting their work known.
In short, the small indie publishers we have in the UK are in it because they are passionate about creating the means to have this poetry conversation we all value, and this is my moment to give them all a vote of thanks. Where would poets be without them?
A Step Back to Leap Forward
June 1, 2026 Reading time: 7 minutes
After all the promotion and four readings from Comrades of Dark Night, I'm starting to think of new poems. I've seen a lot of younger poets starting to explore the kind of territory I have been working in, so I'm coming to the conclusion that it is time for me to expand a little, and it's exciting and new. Only perhaps it's not quite that new - I'm sure I've looked at archaeology and magic and layers of accumulated history before, but ..... I got swamped with self-doubt, and wondering what on earth it is that I actually do, and I took occasion to look again at my previous book The Well of the Moon, which had the enormous privilege of an introduction by Alan Riach. I can't tell you how wonderful it is to get such sustained attention from so careful a scholar, and frankly, it is a real encouragement.
There are not many copies of The Well of the Moon left, so before this lovely review disappears into oblivion, I really wanted to share it. I should encourage you to follow the links to Tobar an Dualchais too - they are fascinating!
The Well of the Moon by Elizabeth Rimmer
Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature, Glasgow University
Elizabeth Rimmer’s poems in The Well of the Moon are records of accurate detail assembling particular things through an emotional structuring of language which ensures a sensitised apprehension of the world, from wrens to rainbows, from weeds to ways of water, light and air, their taste and scent, their sound and language. You can breathe the feeling of ‘rocket, lavender, and coming rain’ at nightfall, as the garden ‘is falling awake’. At night, the chickweed’s ‘heart-shaped leaves’ are drawn close together, enfolding ‘to protect the younger growing shoots from frost.’ In sunshine, the iris is ‘like / a thrown golden spear, the talking of rushes.’
The book begins with ‘gallus herbs’ of ‘verge and scrub’, the weeds, blowing seeds over hills, ‘tough, bristly, bitter’ and goes on to itemise the roads that can be mapped in birdsong, the ‘cunning kingfisher’ whose shine tells us he’s ‘swallowed the summer’, the ‘potatoes / big enough for mice to nest in’ and the tomato with its ‘skin loose as on a granny’s hands, / fine as satin, but electric bright / with hoarded sun’.
All these careful noticings, of plants, vegetables, birds, geographies of actual place and tentative emotional uncovering, accumulate gently to a book that teaches unobtrusively a sharp sustained attention. The poet who has touched the salmon’s wisdom with her thumb is always an apprentice, ‘scarred, accidental, listening’ and the apprehension of the world by personal senses becomes in itself a narrative of guardianship, shielding us from the brutalities of exploitation. Without excess, we can savour ‘how a plant spreads / itself joyously in the soil it likes’. We can become ‘haunted by wet places, the lure / of rivers, reedbeds and green lands of ash / and willow’. This is not rhapsody or entrancement but a seemingly effortless persistence of study and annotation.
‘The Well of the Moon’ draws from legends of Finn MacCool as retold by Lady Gregory and transforms the narrative source into an observational affirmation. An archaeological dig at the ruined Abbey of Cambuskenneth yields more than material things: this is a discovery of immaterial realities, hitherto buried in obscurity, the yirdit things. These poems blend and balance, but never dissolve, specific things, people, sources, constructions of nature and culture, into a composite ethos where words are working hard but undemandingly, unassertively, almost everywhere assured.
‘Spelling the Rainbow’ gauges the meanings of colours, like ‘Glaukopis (grey)’ as it ‘shifts between green / and blue and hazel’, the colour of ‘the eyes of Athena, the exact / representation of wisdom’; ‘Gorm (blue-black)’ is the colour of ‘bruises and the tart / skins of brambles and damson’ or ‘the sea when clouds threaten’. The sequence is based on Alice Oswald’s understanding that colour words always suggest an ‘emotional resonance’.
Without the flamboyance, personalities or didactic moral intent and irony but with something of the same magic intact, Rimmer’s poems have some affinity with Maurice Ravel’s wonderful little opera masterpiece, L'enfant et les sortilèges. The evocation of living things in the natural world has another kind of affinity with the Gaelic representations, or rather, translations, of birdsong to be found in the archives of Tobar an Dualchais, the Kist o Riches, at the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University, a wonderful labyrinth of over 50,000 recordings from the 1930s till now, still so badly under-explored. Try this for thrush, lark, crow, seagull and dove:
http://www.tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/fullrecord/25889?backURL=/en/search%3Fpage%3D1%23track_25889
But words on the page do different things than music or sound recordings. In the beautiful production of Red Squirrel Press, Rimmer’s poems are permitted the space and letters-on-paper presence required to be read and held silently in the mind and mortal memory. They stay there delivering replenishment like the poet’s grandmother’s ghosts, women unseen, spooky, present in air, counterparts and counterpoints to Gerda Stevenson’s Quines. Stevenson’s poems give voices to historical women whose biographies cry out to be brought forward. For the most part, the lives of the women conjured up in The Well of the Moon remain unknown, unverified by data, but they are nonetheless present, informing, guides and scouts for all of us. We look for such presence as theirs in Elizabeth Rimmer’s poems ‘like a child obsessively checking / if the ghost is still under the bed / and it always is.’
The Landscape of Well-Being
May 21, 2026 Reading time: 8 minutes
Wellwater Karen Solie
Slow Now with Clear Skies Julene T Weaver
Glasgoscopy Vicki Husband
The pandemic has provoked much thinking around the questions of health, community, and the environment, and I have been reading three poetry collections, dealing with them in different ways and from different perspectives. Julene T Weaver lives now in Seattle, having moved from New York. She is a psychotherapist and a herbalist, and has a long history of activism in the LGBTQ+ community. Vicki Husband is an occupational therapist with the NHS in Glasgow.
Karen Solie whose collection Wellwater won the 2025 TS Eliot prize lives between St Andrews in Scotland and Saskatchewan in Canada.
Karen Solie's perspective is shaped by her rural past as much as her current city living. Wellwater considers what we do to land, with our fantasies of development and productivity, our insistence that we can control and improve everything, including our own bodies. In The Grasslands, she talks about chemical pollution of groundwater, the damage of wildfires, the loss of biodiversity across the prairies.
the silvery, slender, rough
needle-leafed, wavy-leafed, cut-leaf, thyme-leafed.
wild, false, tufted and procumbent, fringed and nodding, the long-bracted, shaggy,
pleated, brittle, the creeping and the smooth,
panicled and pale, common
and endangered
We reintroduce species without understanding their context, the network of relationships, because we don’t understand our own.
Your solitude returned to you unopened
and unable now to see your own hand in front of you
you are actual size among your equals
ibid
We are only now coming to feel the grief for what we have done; we don’t yet even understand what we have lost.
Vicki Husband might. In Glasgoscopy she visited her patients during lockdown, driving through the quiet, almost abandoned streets of Glasgow to see quiet, almost abandoned people in their homes. The journey becomes multi-layered as throughout the book, the patient becomes the city, the city becomes the body, as medical professionals investigate, intrude, believe they are trying to cure.
A woman walks into a lobby, a hallway, a corridor ---
a woman walks into a room, aware that she can ---
a woman walks into a room as traffic, as blood -----
a woman walks into a policy, a crisis, a question ---
a woman walks into a room, within it is a person, and this is their city
A Woman Walks into a City
Descriptions of severe illness, incapacity, deprivation and loneliness are unvarnished
The tremor in P’s hands shakes ash onto the rug. Once or twice it threatens to catch light, until he stamps it out. He scolds his arm as if it were a child who never learns. The weight is falling off, the tremor eats up calories faster than he can take them on.
Room
but never without dignity, without respect for the resilience, the hope, the individuality of the patients – the one who brought his pigeons in to the house because the cooing helps him to sleep, the ones who insist ‘there’s worse aff than me’, those cherishing their dogs, the view from the windows, their homes full of memories. The languages of medical investigation are mirrored by these journeys, the progress of disease by the landscape of the stilled city. This book is a stunning, intense work of art, but the standout lines for me go beyond poetry
And the point of listening to the story, is the telling of the story,
And the point of telling the story is that someone has listened.
The Scope of Practice
Julene T Weaver writes like someone determined to move beyond the paralysis of the pandemic. She is a writer on a journey, through her own catastrophic illness, through the pandemic, from the farm of her childhood to the city, and from New York to Seattle. Her book is about re-establishing contacts, with the neighbours from whom her life has isolated her:
People like me aren’t expected
to ride a bus. To walk the lonely
streets. To meet those who provide the labor
that builds our cities.
Bus Stop in San Antonio AWP Off-site
She connects the fruit crops of her youth, now threatened by drought and higher temperatures in summer, to the crates of nectarines she buys at farmers’ markets and beyond them to the orchards burning in Gaza. She sees the collapse of social rituals and timetables as people tried to work out lockdown strategies, the protocols they devised for safety, the moment of holding the hand of a stranger in distress in the days of gathering anxiety immediately before lockdown. She resists despair
I’ll not go there with this new pandemic
I lived through one war, AIDS. -----
It’s time
for massive change before we proceed.
Slow now, with clear skies.
I’ve Lived Through One War
Dark Night
April 17, 2026 Reading time: 6 minutes
I have been checking the proofs of the book, which is now with the printers, and though I am busily arranging readings, and updating all my online profiles, I am also getting reacquainted with something that I almost feel I wrote in another century. One thing that surprised me, though goodness knows it shouldn't, with a title like that, is the number of poems inspired by things that happened on nights when I couldn't sleep.
Sometimes it was ordinary observations of foxes, owls calling or people chatting as they passed in the dark. There is a footpath that runs beside our house across a grassy open field, and you often hear the young ones on their way home from parties or all-night video game sessions, the stragglers from late-running barbeques or even other insomniacs walking their dogs. More than once there were ambitious, if rather inept, burglars trying our front door. Once there were three young foxes playing on the grass, a vixen calling in the tangle of brambles above the burn. I thought about the differences between the way we see wild creatures and the way we see young people, the way we see neighbours and the way we see strangers. I remembered stories about fairy people with all the ambivalence of wonder and magic and mischief, and that in some communities, if you wanted to speak about them you called them 'the good neighbours'. It's not just who we see, and how we see them, it's who sees us.
I connected with my forgotten younger self lying awake listening to people in the street going home from the pub, or hearing heavy footsteps echoing in the entry passage between the houses.
After Bedtime
Before I could read, I slept no more than a cricket
does in summer, chirping and jumping out of bed,
inventing fears when giant footsteps sounded
in the entry between the houses - my father
coming home from night school, a neighbour
off the late shift. Bigger children playing out,
men singing in the dark, made nights mysterious,
the grownup world, longed-for and forbidden.
Now the clump of feet as neighbours douse
their barbeques and walk their dogs, young ones
slink home after curfew, girls post-mortem shifts
in friends’ relationships, lads fail to ask whose jacket
they’re wearing now, is comforting, familiar.
I have learned the landmarks. I know where I am.
I have never slept very well, even as a baby, and I was always in trouble for reading until it was dark, or jumping out to see if we had visitors, or getting up very early to write in peace, before anyone else could ask what I was doing. Later, as life got darker and more anxious, I would lie awake for hours worrying about the children, or the health of whichever one of us was in hospital, our financial stability or global warming and the end of civilisation, or if I was going out of my mind.
Which brings me to the other 'dark night' in the book. I got to the phrase from the translation of the Homeric poem in praise of Hermes, the original 'comrade of dark night', which led me to alchemy, and the alchemical process of personal growth, and so back to St John of the Cross, whose commentary on his great poem, The Dark Night of the Soul, shows parallels with the thinking of alchemists of his day. It's a cliché now for a period of misery and self-questioning, but I thought it might reflect the time we had all gone through during the pandemic. Many of us suffered losses, bereavements, upheavals, long periods of anxiety and isolation. Some people had it easier than others, but very few of us got out unscarred in some way. There are a lot of poems in this book inspired by our housemove and settling into a new environment. It wasn't just strangeness and adaptation, it became a process of recovery - finding or making connections, accepting losses and changes, finding ways of healing and connecting, finding new joy.
Come and listen! My first reading will be at St Bride's Church Hall, 21 Greenlees Road Cambuslang G72 8JB, at 2.30 on 7th May. There will be music as well as poetry from me and Anne Connolly, tea and cake!
The second one will be at St Mungo's Mirrorball, in Waterstones on Sauchiehall Street, on 14th May from 7-9. I don't yet know who the headliner will be, but there will be several other poets reading too. This is free to Mirrorball members but £7 for non-members. Membership is £25 pa, so you only have to go to four events to be in profit, and for that you will hear some of the best poetry available in Scotland.
The book will be available from the publisher Red Squirrel Press, and from my shop, after the 7th May.
Comrades of Dark Night is Coming
March 4, 2026 Reading time: 3 minutes
This is my stock cupboard, with the two books still in print - Haggards and The Well of the Moon. As you can see, I have many copies available - my publisher Red Squirrel Press is celebrating twenty years in business, which involves revamping her website and making room for the exciting ventures she has in prospect, so, although the old books are selling well, if you want a copy, you need to buy them here.
Please do - I need to clear space myself, because soon there will be the new book, Comrades of Dark Night. The exciting phase of getting it out has started as we hope to have news of an event in the first week of May in my next post, but work is under way on the cover, and I am looking for reading opportunities and potential reviewers.
I have a deep love for this collection. It was written during a time of intense upheaval, not only for me but for all of us, and though I really didn't want to write a 'pandemic book', it is inevitably marked by the traumas we all went through, the changes we wanted to make, or failed to make, the losses, the discoveries, the shifts in values and awareness we all went through. I think this is the most human-centred of my books. There are plenty of herb poems and landscape poems, the usual rain, weeds and rivers and seasonal changes as you might expect, but really I wanted to focus on the process of shift and settling, the way we get to know new places, the way we begin to feel we belong, what we bring with us, our growing awareness of who - and what we find there. It is less about getting to know, more about letting ourselves be known, and it's a very uncomfortable process. We not only observe, but we are observed, and sometimes judged.
There are poems that deal with discovery, but also projection, rules and barriers, and also welcome. There are poems about conflict, loss and uncertainty, but also about solidarity and the processes of communication and creativity. The 'dark night' reference may feel appropriate, and we meet some dangerous characters along the way, but I'd like to think it emerges in a place of healing.
New Workshop - Leaf Support
February 17, 2026 Reading time: ~1 minute
My friend Susan Richardson and I have collaborated to develop a poetry workshop, which will have its first on-line appearance later this year.
The original date has had to be cancelled for family reasons, but we will be rescheduling, so watch this space for news.
Please get in touch by email at poet@burnedthumb.com or via the contact form to ask for further information and to book a place.