Pamphlets may be ordered and paid for on-line, or click here if you would rather print an order form and mail it with a cheque.
Lilith Speaks, Subcutaneous and Still Life were the three winning pamphlets selected by Jane Routh and Ian Duhig for the 2024 Litfest/Wayleave pamphlet competition
Lilith Speaks by Clare Proctor
ISBN 978-1-0685762-1-8
Price £7
In these confident and accomplished poems, Clare Proctor explores and gives voice to the experiences of women, particularly those constrained by their context, whether historical, or through art, myth or individual circumstance. They move from the particular to the more general in considering ideas around the body, death, motherhood and family. Read more…
Still Life by Rebecca Bilkau
ISBN 978-1-0685762-2-5
Price £7
With their idiomatic and conversational voice, Rebecca Bilkau’s poems on mortality and grief look the inevitable in the eye and manage a celebration of life even as it accommodates death. Her language is lively and engaging as she considers loss, retrieval, survival and simple speculation with compassion, wit and a grounded wisdom. Read more…
Subcutaneous by Maria Isakova-Bennett
ISBN 978-1-0685762-0-1
Price £7
In spare and delicately-balanced language Maria Isakova-Bennett’s poems about family, loss and the effects of being silenced address her grandfather’s enforced migration to England, the secrecy he lived with and its effects on subsequent generations. Read more…
Press Rewind Play Again
A Wayleave Anthology
ISBN 978-1-8383378-9-6
Price £6
Wayleave Press was started in 2014 to publish good quality and modestly priced pamphlets of poetry. The aim was to focus on thematically cohesive work from published poets or first publications by poets who had not so far had a collection of their own work. Over the last 10 years, the press has published 36 pamphlets by 23 different poets.
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Small and Necessary Lives by Ron Scowcroft
ISBN 978-1-8383378-7-2
Price £6
Ron Scowcroft brings into focus an overlooked world of small and necessary lives. Whether rumoured, imagined or real, they command attention with a quiet and meticulous voice. The last wolf in England, a builder’s brief dance, a magical night of star-gazing, all provide opportunities to reflect on the endurance of passing moments.
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Walking the Dog in Wolfenbüttel
by Rebecca Bilkau
ISBN 978-1-8383378-6-5
Price £6
In this, her third pamphlet from Wayleave Press, Rebecca Bilkau, whose natural home is North Lancashire, explores the town of Wolfenbüttel, her adopted home in Germany for six months of the year. Her perceptiveness and imagination celebrate real and projected encounters as she walks her dog round the old town. With characteristic energy and descriptive flair in which empathy and unflinching observation sit side by side, she guides us through a contemporary world every bit as rich and baroque as the old town itself. Read more…
Things Being Various by Neil Curry
ISBN 978-1-8383378-5-8
Price £6
This is Neil Curry’s second pamphlet with Wayleave. In it he seeks, in his own words, ‘to re-state the claims of the imagination’. These short reflective pieces have a compelling eloquence, the writing relaxed and expansive, while the ideas and imagery are succinct and striking. Read more…
Spider Time by William Gilson
ISBN 978-1-8383378-4-1
Price £6
This is William Gilson’s second pamphlet with Wayleave. Originally from New England, he has lived in Cumbria since 1995, although his work remains distinctly American in tone and feel. To the delights and pains of daily life and the persistence of memory are added imaginative encounters with his own literary greats such as Thoreau, Clare and Emily Dickinson. These are thoughtful, finely tuned and succinctly descriptive poems.
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When the World Was Left in Pieces by Jennifer Copley
ISBN 978-1-8383378-3-4
Price £6
These heartfelt, intense poems lay bare the horror, trauma and sheer fatigue felt by those living in a war zone. In vivid language, Jennifer Copley takes us into the homes of those who must burn their clothes to stay alive, or walk ‘a hundred roads’ to have a chance of escaping the conflict. Read more…
Rib by Sharon Black
ISBN 978-1-8383378-2-7
Price £5
In 24 poems reflecting the number of ribs in the human body, Sharon Black considers, through metaphor, allegory and personal experience, our relationship with this crucial part of our bodies. In turn allusive, playful and personally direct, these poems explore the resilience and vulnerability we can feel within the body we inhabit.
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After by Jane Routh
ISBN 978-1-8383378-1-0
Price £5
These thoughtful and elegantly written poems celebrate the way art responds to art, how personal engagement with the fruits of another’s creativity can delve and open up beyond the image itself to explore history, landscape, imagination, the role of women artists and the nature of inspiration itself. Read more…
Loop by Pauline Yarwood
ISBN 978-1-8383378-0-3
Price £5
The poems in this, Pauline Yarwood’s second Wayleave pamphlet, start from a particular locality, the ‘narrow valley’ where she lives, and move to and fro between the present and her past as if mimicking reflections and memories as they might arise on a daily walk.
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A Northumbrian Book of Hours by Neil Curry
ISBN 978-1-9999728-9-9
Price £4
In these relaxed and elegantly written prose poems, Neil Curry seeks to intertwine – like Anglo Saxon interlace – three different timelines: the history of Lindisfarne, the canonical hours and the passing of the seasons. Read more…
Just Above the Waterline by Elizabeth Hare
ISBN 978-1-9999728-8-2
Price £5
The poems here are concerned with issues affecting the poet’s daily life: her work with refugees, coronavirus and lockdown. Directness and warmth are their hallmark, bringing a thoughtful compassion to bear on immediate experience. Read more…
Sunday’s Child by Rebecca Bilkau
ISBN 978-1-9999728-7-5
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In this powerful sequence of poems, Rebecca Bilkau writes from first hand experience of illegitimacy, its effects on both parent and child and the complex ways it has featured in her and her mother’s life. Read more…
Self-portrait as Ornithologist by Karen Lloyd
ISBN 978-0-9928946-9-6
Price £5
With imagination, wit and keen observation, Karen Lloyd celebrates the natural world through a human lens. Creatures, particularly birds, are brought to life by her descriptive powers. She takes obvious pleasure at sharing the world with them, while at the same time being aware of the impact of human behaviour on the environment. Read more…
Saving Fruit
by Lynda Plater
ISBN 978-1-9999728-5-1
Price £5
Labour, love and belonging are rendered in spare, finely-wrought vignettes from the often hard lives of the poet’s family, who worked the land and coast of Lincolnshire throughout the twentieth century.
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The Hoopoe’s Eye
by Mark Carson
ISBN 978-1-9999728-4-4
Price £5
These poems respond to what can only be described as a domestic disaster, the dramatic flood which engulfed the poet’s house in Spain.
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The Archaeologist’s Daughter
by Antony Christie
ISBN 978-1-9999728-3-7
Price £5
Through a series of finely detailed and focused vignettes from The Archaeologist’s Daughter’s professional career, Antony Christie evokes the passion and dedication entailed in the experience of fieldwork. Perceptive atmospheric poems describe both the patience and the excitement involved as she uncovers remains and artefacts from which to infer a history.
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Testimony
by Elizabeth Hare
ISBN 978-1-9999728-2-0
Price £5
In poems that are down-to-earth and compassionate, Elizabeth Hare writes of a world where what unites us is more important than what separates us.
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A Boat of Many Colours
A Wayleave Anthology
ISBN 978-1-9999728-0-6
Price £5
Wayleave Press was started in 2014 to publish good quality and modestly priced pamphlets of poetry. The aim was to focus on thematically cohesive work from published poets or first publications by poets who had not so far had a collection of their own work. The press has so far produced 21 publications by 17 different poets.
Read more…
Dear Body
by Hannah Hodgson
ISBN 978-1-9999728-0-6
Price £5
Hannah Hodgson, who suffers from an array of conditions that dramatically affect her life, draws on her own illness and disability in an explicit and courageous way, with direct and artful poems that raise questions about the relationship between personal identity, the physical body and our place in the world.
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The Man Who Wasn’t Ever Here
by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
ISBN 978-0-9935103-9-7
Price £5
This sequence of poems emerges from the poet’s attempts to find out more about the elusive and enigmatic figure of his grandfather, to ‘fix his likeness’ as it were. Using documented fragments of a private story and his own considerable powers of imagination, Michael Bartholomew-Biggs creates an engaging tribute to an ordinary life that takes him closer to his own roots. It is a narrative that might have passed relatively unnoticed yet which nonetheless is integral to the wider sweep of history as it touches on currently sensitive issues of immigration, national identity and terrorism.
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The Tilt by Jean Harrison
ISBN 978-0-9935103-7-3
Price £5
These poems, reflecting on a period of time when the author was teaching in the newly independent Ghana, evoke something of the mystery and excitement Africa of that time presented to a European, a tilt from a familiar world view towards a new and very different one. Focusing on personal experience, the contradictions and tensions between a recent colonial history and emerging independence are subtly apparent in Jean Harrison’s clear-eyed writing, which also displays her precise and distinctive powers of description.
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Image Junkie by Pauline Yarwood
ISBN 978-0-9935103-7-3
Price £5
Pauline Yarwood’s poems have the freshness and energy of someone speaking directly to you, someone you want to listen to. She writes of encounters with friends, strangers, family, herself, alert to the undercurrents of thought and emotion.
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The Promise Boat by Mike Barlow
ISBN 978-0-9935103-6-6
Price £5
These poems are concerned with the way our world can be other than it seems, where the certainties of belonging, borders, history and faith can shift, become illusory, and launch us into unsettling waters.
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The Island by Chris Considine
ISBN 978-0-9935103-5-9
Price £5
In grounded yet imaginative poems Chris Considine evokes Looe Island, a small island off the coast of Cornwall. Though she writes of a particular place, her writing touches the essence of all islands: both of the world and yet apart from it, where ‘Tides rise and fall like breathing’, and when one arrives or departs depends on the elements more than one’s own decisions. This is a place of quiet, a place of storm, steeped in a small history and yet still witness to present celebration.
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Out of Deep Time by Paul Mills
ISBN 978-0-9935103-4-2
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In writing that is fresh, dramatic and imaginative, Paul Mills reflects on the story of human evolution. The confidence and skills of an experienced writer enable him to inhabit and explore ideas involved in deep time and present the reader with a view of humanity both affecting and broad in scope.
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Plum by Elizabeth Burns
ISBN 978-0-9935103-2-8
Price £5
Meticulously observed and celebrated in precise and lyrical language, this is an extended meditation on a single tree across all its seasons. Completed at the end of 2014, this long poem is presented here as Elizabeth had planned it. Read more…
Coronach by Martyn Halsall
ISBN 978-0-9935103-1-1
Price £5
Whether he’s considering old settlements and ruins, a search for an elusive butterfly or a painting of migrating birds, Martyn Halsall’s atmospheric poems always honour the human presence in the landscape. A thoughtful and sensitive voice, part celebratory and part elegaic, is accompanied by a powerful descriptive ability. Read more…
Three Seasons for Burning by Lynda Plater
ISBN 978-0-9935103-0-4
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Summer, autumn and winter are the seasons of many of Lynda Plater’s poems in which elegies, forebears and intense moments of recollection mingle. Her distinctive rhythms and language have a songlike quality, part homage, part celebration. Read more…
Choosing New Omens by Rebecca Bilkau
ISBN 978-0-9928946-8-9
Price £5
The experience of moving from England to start a new life in Germany with her German husband provides the background to these vivid and thoughtful poems by Rebecca Bilkau. They chronicle the mixed emotions that come with upping sticks and making a home in a new country. As well as the struggle with language, identity and belonging, there is also an outsider’s perspective on regional culture and history. Her rich and energetic language is underpinned by an engaging honesty. Read more…
Clay by Elizabeth Burns
ISBN 978-0-9928946-9-6
Price £5
These small, meditative poems about pottery and the potter’s craft are themselves exquisitely formed vessels for larger enquiry and celebration. Read more…
Hove-to is a State of Mind by Mark Carson
ISBN 978-0-9928946-7-2
Price £5
Drawing on Irish roots, a career as an ocean engineer and time spent in Africa, Mark Carson’s poems are very much at ease with themselves as they evoke and celebrate particular experiences: a cross-cultural encounter camping in the bush, a night-time call-out on a research vessel at sea, a chance meeting between youth and beauty in the west of Ireland, all vividly described as if the reader were there too. Read more…
Monkey Puzzle by William Gilson
ISBN 978-0-9928946-6-5
Price £5
Bill Gilson is an American from New England who came to live in Cumbria with his young family in 1995. In these utterly distinctive poems he writes of the conflicting emotions of this transition. Conflating the past and present almost seamlessly, here is one man’s attempt to confront the puzzle of how we end up living the lives we do. Read more…
The White Silence by Jane Routh
ISBN 978-0-9928946-5-8
Price £4
These poems relate to Sir John Franklin’s 1845 naval expedition to find the ‘North West Passage’ through the Arctic ice. However, rather than a narrative account of that disaster, Jane Routh is drawn to the mystery of what is not known, even unknowable: the ‘white silence’ of ice and of the expedition’s demise – like the silence of a white page an artist might face at the start of new work. With intelligence, wit and touching homage to an episode in history that still haunts us, her poems place Franklin both in his own time and our own. Read more…
Moon Garden by Ron Scowcroft
ISBN 978-0-9928946-1-0
Price £5
Whether he’s writing about a sheepdog on the Falklands, a constellation or a colony of storks, Ron Scowcroft’s thoughtful and well-honed poems draw you back for futher reading. His practiced ear for just the right word enables him to make ordinary moments uncannily affecting, while also placing them adroitly in their wider context. A poet who never tells you too much but leaves you thinking. Read more…
A Scarlet Thread by Elizabeth Burns
ISBN 978-0-9928946-2-7
Price £4
This elegantly crafted sequence of poems about Scottish painter Anne Redpath displays Elizabeth Burns’ sensitivity to colour, place and time as she contemplates the life of the artist. Read more…
By the Light of Day by Pauline Keith
ISBN 978-0-9928946-3-4
Price £5
These poems draw on Pauline Keith’s childhood experiences in the family slaughter-yard. With an unflinching eye, emotional resilience and strong compassion she portrays the gruesome yet everyday business she grew up around. Here, that formative environment has produced compelling images and recollections in poems which throw light on an aspect of our world not often dwelt upon. For all their subject matter, these are rewarding poems of sensitivity and honesty. Read more…
Crazy Days by Carole Coates
ISBN 978-0-9928946-4-1
Price £5
When her life was inexplicably thrown into turmoil, Carole Coates had both the presence of mind and the skill to record the experience and in so doing has produced beautiful examples of how personal difficulty can transform itself into art. With candour, compassion and wit, her common-sense and intimately pitched voice manages to convey, in a deeply affecting way, the confusion and pathos of the situation she and her husband struggled with. Read more…
The Folded Moment by Mike Barlow
ISBN 978-0-9928946-0-3
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Drawing on the experience of living in rural north Lancashire, Mike Barlow’s poems evoke the sense of another world, one in which he is both intruder and intruded upon. His woods, fells, river and stones with their weather and atmosphere are at times almost animate – wilful and contrary – whilst his own presence is ‘flawed by thought’. Read more…