Save Salt Publishing, and golden syrup

Salt Publishing, a very fine global poetry and short story publisher, are having a difficult time.

They are asking everyone to buy just one of their books - either from them direct or from anywhere else.

I just bought three (naughty) - Isobel Dixon's collection A Fold in the Map which I've been meaning to get for a while, and two impulse buys based on a recommendation and reading a poem by each of the poets - Andrew Grace's A Belonging Field and Mark Waldron's The Brand New Dark.

Do pop over to Salt and see what they have to offer - poetry needs poetry readers more than other genres need their readers. We must love it as much as we can. It will love you back.

Here's one of Waldron's strange and beautiful poems.

Oh, I almost forgot. Golden syrup on porridge for breakfast. Lovely shining slow golden syrup. Lucky me.

*

We Think We See Richness, Said Dougal,

but it’s as thin as…
as thin as…
Paper? ventured Florence, crossing and winding
her pretty legs. Her dark eyes

are ovals of infinite charm.
And Dougal felt, as he often did,
that he might topple into them and be wholly unfound
and he’d find in there the other lost mutts
who fly and go in undulating packs,
forgetting why and longing
in a putty-coloured piece of brain,
to be owned again,
and be more than what they have become –
nothing but her foaming happiness
rising in her as a swarm of barking pooch.

No, thinner than paper, said Dougal sadly.
I’m afraid there’s nothing there at all,
we make it all up,
it forms in front of us as we go.


Mark Waldron
(with kind permission from the author)