Agenda Editions is Agenda’s own publishing company

which produces small, beautifully printed, limited editions of an individual’s poems.

New, Recent and Forthcoming Poetry from Agenda Editions:

Visit the online bookshop to place your order or contact Agenda Editions, The Wheelwrights, Fletching Street, Mayfield, East Sussex TN20 6TL or email: editor@agendapoetry.co.uk

                                                     Patricia McCarthy

                                                      Rodin's Shadow

                          Due for Publication by Agenda Editions / Clutag Press

                                                       October 2012

‘Rodin’s Shadow is a tour de force with its impressive energy, and the almost uncanny smell of the real that it gives off. And these women are real, that’s for sure. I love the way the sections feed off each other and there’s a powerful sense of accrual. There are changes in pace, changes in tempo, twists in diction, all of which ensure that the register is up, the momentum brightening; they never threaten the unity of the whole piece, however, and this makes for a page-turner. A highly ambitious, highly original and achieved book, full of passionate endeavour’...Tim Liardet

‘This collection is truly moving. The poems are energetic, exciting, demanding and rewarding. Patricia McCarthy is doing something unique here, using persona and art history to great effect. There is an energy to the language, and a half-wild experimentation that is uplifting and yet controlled. The shifting between rhyme and free verse is also exact and exacting. There is a fine labour manifest throughout and I find the whole a rich achievement’... John F. Deane

‘I am struck by the poignancy of this collection and particularly like the sense of place in many of the poems which pull off the rare trick of being deeply personal yet, through Patricia McCarthy’s deft poetic skill – the ethereal imagery, the subtle use of rhyme and line foregrounding – become at the same time universal. This collection is a tour de force, so assured poetically and dramatically. Sensual, atmospheric, engaging, highly moving at the end, with a wonderful sense of narrative drive, the work is of a consistently high quality’... Josephine Balmer

‘Hats off to Rodin’s Shadow. It is excellent: intense, oneiric, erotic, very poetic, very passionate, and deeply knowledgeable about its characters and background. An exhausting but thoroughly enjoyable exploration of the psychic territory of those brilliant, destroyed women. There is so much behind the writing, and there isn’t a single dud poem here’...Tony Roberts

‘These poems take Camille Claudel, Gwen John and Rose Beuret as starting points and muses, spinning out from their stories and emotions beautiful, lyrical poems, sometimes in an elegiac tone, sometimes even flooded with tragedy and regret, but also with a visceral, muscular hold on everyday reality, physical, outspoken and sustained through Patricia McCarthy’s inimitable, elegant style and polish’...Sue Roe

                               Order your copy now at the Agenda Online Bookshop

‘Sabbagh is a rare and gifted poet. He brings enormous pressure to bear on his themes – love, existential meaning, the rage against darkness, an identity finely tuned to both Beirut and the West – marshalling philosophy and literary allusion with intelligence and elegance so that the reader is immersed in his distinctive world in which ‘…sense has two meanings: / To make you see and to make you see.’ (After Conrad’s Preface…). Waxed Mahogany has the hallmarks of his previous two collections – an emotional intensity and vivid honesty in constant dialogue with the metaphysical and analytical – but with an increasingly assured voice and daring range; an extraordinary and exciting poet.’

Dr Jan Fortune

Editor, Cinnamon Press & Envoi

‘In Waxed Mahoghany you will find poems written by an audacious young poet that cover the topics most young poets write on: parents, elegies, lust and longing, mortality; but unlike many published today, you will not find ordinary language in any of them. Perhaps it comes from Sabbagh’s dual identity as Arab and Englishman, but one hears echoes of Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, Fady Joudah in the poems’ alliterations, bold rhymes, surprising metaphors, richness in noun and verb. Sabbagh writes with a refreshing, muscular formalism to challenge the pallid ‘free verse’ so much in vogue. A winner.’

Norbert Hirschhorn, MD, author of Monastery Of The Moon

                             Order your copy now at the Agenda Online Bookshop

Powerful and coherent….. a singular voice in Irish poetry……things unsaid hovering at the edges of the poems that give them a haunted and disturbing charge. Joseph Horgan’s poems resonate particularly powerfully in the shifting culture of Ireland today with its massive transformation in population and community. In the contemporary reality we need poets who will sing homelessness and rootlessness. We should cherish these voices which bring an aboriginal consciousness to the present moment.

Paula Meehan

I find in Joseph Horgan’s poems the cool detachment and severed strength of the loner; the poems hover at times on the verge of self-mockery. His sense of humour chuckles at his own endlessly active intelligence. Joseph Horgan’s poetry is rich in strong, unusual qualities.

Brendan Kennelly

These poems sting like whiskey and imbibing them it is easy to see why Horgan was garlanded with 2004’s Patrick Kavanagh Award.

Billy Ramsell, The Stinging Fly

Brian Whelan, this astonishing artist, is drawn to themes of the utmost profundity and yet treats them with a whimsical originality that is surprisingly affecting. This is very strong art: not for aesthetic wimps.

Sister Wendy Beckett, Art historian and critic

‘Brian – keep the brush in your hand!’

Seamus Heaney

In this compelling first collection, Caroline Clark plays with languages and with language itself. Her vision is pure and touched with the numinous. Her poems, delicate yet strong, at times impressionistic, catch different lights, essences, tastes and colours – all laid on carefully with a palette knife. Through time and place she leads the reader to the centre of things in a sure, promising voice totally her own.

W.S. Milne

Jean Cassou’s The Madness of Amadis and other poems,

                        translated by Timothy Adès (£9.99)

        (Bilingual edition: French and English on facing pages)

Jean Cassou, a war time Resistance leader in France, is still somewhat under-appreciated. These intriguing poems represent the body of Cassou’s work, following his famous 33 Sonnets of the Resistance (also translated by Timothy Adès), composed and memorised while Cassou was in prison, forbidden any writing materials.

          ‘Without strain, Adès creates

          a perfect mirror for Cassou’s language’…

          ‘He has done the literate British a huge service’…

         ‘Cassou’s shade must be glowing’…

         ‘Ades’ sensitivity xrays the heart of every poem’.

.

                                                              Harry Guest.

                                       AGENDA EDITIONS

                                          A Woman Called Rose

                                               and other poems

                 Published July 2011: Spanish poems translated by Arthur Terry who, just

                 before he died, sent a hand-written letter to William Cookson, expressing

                 a strong wish for Agenda Editions to bring this collection out. This has at

                 last been made possible by a generous grant from the estate of the late

                 Elizabeth Robertson, a lover of poetry.

                 Arthur Terry was part of the Belfast Writing Group which included such

                 well-known poets as Seamus Heaney, Philip Hobsbaum, Michael Longley,

                 James Simmons and Derek Mahon.

                 Price: £9 (plus P&P)

                 Order from: editor@agendapoetry.co.uk

Zarathustra

Nicholas Jagger

This long poem is a response to Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, rendering in strong and urgent language Nietzsche’s call to a journey away from accepted norms and towards true self-realisation.  By turns lyrical and acerbic, and deploying many different voices, the poem offers an imaginative engagement with the challenges posed by Nietzsche’s figure of Zarathustra.  The cover illustration and the drawings placed throughout the book come from a complementary body of painting and sculpture in which the poet explores the nature of masks and effigies.

Published by Agenda Editions

The Wheelwrights

Fletching Street

Mayfield

East Sussex TN20 6TL

www.agendapoetry.co.uk

ISBN 978-0-902400-93-1   Price £10

Gary Allen:  Iscariot’s Dream (£8.99)

This poignant, multi-layered collection – particularly relevant for our day in its treatment of treachery, and its detailed, graphic rendering of violence as something revolting, not to be mythologised – is the fourth collection by Gary Allen. It is ‘thronged with the undead’, living ghosts from classical mythology, from the Bible, and from the more recent ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Gary Allen, who was born in Ballymena, Co. Antrim in Northern Ireland, uses his childhood memories to give a gripping reality to this book. He has published three very well-received collections of poetry, the last of which, North of Nowhere, came from Lagan Press in 2006. He has also published a novel, Cillin (Black Mountain, 2005) and a collection of short stories, Introductions (Lagan Press, 2007).

           ‘A Courageous and stunning work’…

           ‘Six poems in, the reader is wrenched awake, and to the realisation: something

            very brave is being done’…

                                                               Ailbhe Darcy in the monthly arts supplement

Jan  Farquharson: No Dammed Tears(£8.99+£1 p&p)

Dante: The Divine Comedy, translated by Laurence Binyon, with La Vita Nuova, translated by D.G. Rossetti
(revised edition) (£10+£1 p&p)

Kenneth Cox: Collected Studies in the Use of English (£12+£1 p&p)

Agenda Editions presents                        The Book of Hours                        by Rainer Maria Rilke                        translated by Christine McNeill                                        and Patricia McCarthy A fresh translation/version of this masterwork by Rilke particularly relevant to our present day: a fine entrance to the rest of his poetry.                       Rarely available in English.                       £10.99 incl p & p

John Montague: A Smile Between The Stones, translations from Sur La Dernière Lande by Claude Esteban, who gained the first Prix Goncourt ever for poetry (usually awarded for prose). (£7.99+£1 p&p)       Desmond O'Grady: Kurdish Poems of Love and Liberty (£9.99+£1 p&p)             Grey Gowrie: The Domino Hymn – poems from Harefield (£10+£1 p&p)

Steven O'Brien: Dark Hill Dreams ( £8.99 + £1 p&p ) (a first collection from this Irish/first Generation British poet).

For further details and to order, contact Agenda Editions, The Wheelwrights, Fletching Street, Mayfield, East Sussex TN20 6TL or email: editor@agendapoetry.co.uk