David Perman is best known as a publisher and organiser of poetry, but his own poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. His Collected contains the best of three published collections since 1997 and a wealth of new poems. These range from travels in Asia and Greece, searching for J.S. Bach in Germany, nostalgia for a London childhood, suffering a stroke and living and writing through the Covid 19 lockdowns. There are also poems about love lost and found, and about the English countryside.

“These are largely earnest, friendly, accessible poems,” wrote Catherine Smith. “There’s evidence of the poet’s compassion, humour and humanity here and at their best they hit the spot”.

Paperback 208 pages    £14.99    ISBN 9781904851837

The dramatic ups and downs of a World Service producer.  Reprimanded and sacked by the Arabic Service, he was then ‘resettled’ and went on to do the BBC’s first controversial interview with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He then interviewed world leaders for their views on the new President of the United States – Ronald Reagan – and ended up managing the Greek Service.

Truly, a ‘Square Peg’ in Bush House.

This is a vital book because it provides a fascinating, wide-ranging memoir of a BBC employee’s various experiences of running the Greek and Arabic departments at Bush House. All of which involved worldwide travel, interviewing politicians and leaders like Margaret Thatcher and the Ayatollah Khomeini. It also reveals the technical side of broadcasting, the innumerable experiences of travel – both the pleasure and hardship of it – and the frequent clash of personalities between the BBC journalists themselves.

This is a fascinating, readable and invaluable history of a period in the life of a remarkable institution.        William Oxley

Paperback – Illustrated    £14.99    ISBN 978-1-904851-806

Wendy French is an editor and poet and the former head of a small school in a psychiatric hospital.

Bread without Butter is her fifth full collection of poetry, in addition to two pamphlets.  She has edited three books of poems by children in hospital, as well as poems about the heart.

Her new poems are about family relationships, in particular concerning her mother and grandparents who lived in a Welsh-speaking, farming community very different from the Wales of the twenty-first century.    There are also poems about the Covid 19 pandemic and the consequent lockdown.

With warmth and unsentimentality Wendy French relives her family’s life across generations, particularly her roots in rural Wales. Often through staunch, simple details, she conveys a sense of the human spirit. It is embodied, for instance, in the farm worker who “taught us to respect even the tiniest daisy in a field of hundreds” (‘Old Tom’). A natural, musical and subtle poet, she can make us think of all the lives we carry within us.
                                                                                  Moniza Alvi

The past is never past and the dead are never dead. In Wendy French’s radiant new collection, her mother’s distant voice is in the pull of her hairbrush, and her father still turns on a walk, a revenant long after his time, to look for the others. The Welsh farmyard, fields, bacon frying, and softly-spoken stories, are at the heart of rich poems in which R. S. Thomas’s instinct for pared-back lives is married to the vividness of Dylan Thomas’s stories – poems in which “the taut band of belonging” beautifully celebrates Wales, the great world, and all of life.                                              Michael Hulse

Paperback      £9.99      ISBN  978-1-904851-813