Jane Commane, Nine Arches Press

One of the great pleasures of being a publisher is that you also have the privilege of working with a poet over a period of time and observing their change and progression. I feel very lucky to have this unique close-up view of a poet’s creative process; the chance to see their ideas take shape, how they develop or build on the foundations of a first collection, how they seek out new routes, inspiration or try out new forms and approaches for future poems and possible future books.

I first encountered Daniel’s poetry at Ledbury Poetry Festival’s open mic in about 2010. The poem he read, which would later appear in his debut poetry collection (absence has a weight of its own, 2012) left me reeling; his poetry was precise and direct, full of unshakeable imagery. By happenstance, he’d just also sent a few poems to Under the Radar, our flagship magazine. Following this came a proposed pamphlet that we worked on and was later published as his first book.

Whilst debuts are of course important, I’m also rather fascinated by what a poet has in their imaginative storeroom – by what might be further down the line for them and their poetics. It’s personal too – I’m also a poet, wrestling with many of these same questions.

For some poets a second or third collection might take a wildcard approach; after setting out their stall in book one or two, rather than continue further along their original path they seek to detonate those previous approaches altogether; reinvent their poetry and, having got their confidence by previous collections, use this as a creative leaping-off point.

For others, a poetry collection is a continuation in a body of work. Here the stakes are similarly high, and this is not necessarily a less risky, innovative or exciting process. The poet continues to revisit the topics and ideas that interest, trouble, and fuel them and their creative process. They circumnavigate, seeking a new way into those themes they have visited before, almost as if to take them by surprise, to defamiliarise and to find that there remains more still to say – and that new forms may enable ways to say it.

These processes are not necessarily oppositional; they come from the same place of creative reinvention, departure and return (the push and pull instinct that powers so many of our creative impulses) and the taking of new routes, even if through a previously known territory, that both approaches embrace in their own way. In many ways, Daniel Sluman’s considered approach in creating single window takes in the best of both.

I first saw the poems that would crystalise into the poems in single window in 2017. What was immediately striking about them, from those earliest stages, was the development of the distinctive form that Daniel has created here; the poems themselves gathered movement, claimed a dynamic space on the page. Something which, through progressive drafts, became an increasingly radical, beautiful form alive on the page.

Paired with the images that depict Daniel and Emily’s lives during this time, the whole collection ultimately became a vivid and incomparable ‘hybrid journal’. The documentation of experience through both poetry and image in single window is also an intrinsic, powerful, re-centering of voice, and is indelibly connected to a whole remarkable thread of poems that Daniel has been writing since the early 2010s, and yet also truly representative of a point, or indeed year, in time.

Clare Pollard

Translated poetry, once a niche within a niche, seems to be growing in popularity for a new generation of writers and readers. Translated poems within the major magazines have become commonplace – this year Poetry Review, under Emily Berry, has been publishing poets such as Stella N’Djoku translated by Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe and Hagiwara Sakutarō translated by Jae Kim, whilst André Naffis-Sahely’s inaugural issue as poetry editor of Poetry London contained translations from Amharic, Arabic, French, Persian and Portuguese. Naffis-Sahely is, of course, a wonderful translator himself, whose translations of the Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi came out with the Poetry Translation Centre this summer.

It is great to see poets from other languages taking their rightful place in anthologies too – Hazel Press’ deeply enjoyable O, a collection of poems on female pleasure edited by Anna Selby, features translations of Kim Hyesoon, Forugh Farrokzhad and Kutti Revathi, along with Zoe Brigley’s memorable version of Gwerful Mechain’s medieval ‘Ode to my Cunt’.

My own co-translation of Anna T. Szabo’s Trust came out with Arc this spring, the results of our friendship over 17 years – all that time ago, when I first visited Hungary with the British Council, I recall being surprised by how nearly every poet I met there also translated as part of their practise. Now poet-translators in the UK seem to abound – from Khairani Barokka to Shash Trevett to Juana Adcock, many of the most exciting poets are enriched by their multilingualism.

Another important shift has been in who gets to be translated. There was a time when white, male, so-called ‘major’ poets dominated (with the fact that certain European countries gave out generous grants making them far more likely to be published as well). Recently, organisations such as PEN and the PTC, with their Sarah Maguire Prize, have been trying to create a much-needed shift towards majority world poets. Presses have also shifted from heavy, exhaustive collections towards fresher, more fleet-footed translation pamphlets. Highlights this year have included Simone Atangana Bekono’s How the First Sparks Became Visible translated by David Colmer (The Emma Press), Anar’s Leaving, translated by Hari Rajaledchumy and Fran Lock (PTC), and the superb Translating Feminisms pamphlets on Indonesian and Filipino poets (Tilted Axis).

All of these, notably, recentre women’s voices. The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation has also done important work in shifting the gender imbalance, with Sasha Dugdale’s translation of Maria Stepanova, The War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe), on the shortlist this year and surely likely to appear on many books of 2021 lists. I can only compare my experience of reading the title poem to that of reading ‘The Waste Land’ for the first time – it is so astonishing, and the effort that has gone into translating it immense.

Elsewhere, the trend for female or nonbinary translations of major texts has continued with Maria Dahvana Headley’s hugely successful Beowulf (that begins with the proclamation ‘Bro!’), and Hollie McNish and Kae Tempest taking on Sophocles’ Antigone and Philoctetes respectively. We all wait patiently for Emily Wilson’s Iliad, but in the meantime it feels like a golden period for translations that are making us rethink the canon.

Clare Pollard has published five collections of poetry and is the editor of Modern Poetry in Translation  

Neil Astley

We are delighted to have another pair of Bloodaxe collections on this year’s T.S. Eliot shortlist, Hannah Lowe’s third collection The Kids and Selima Hill’s twentieth, Men Who Feed Pigeons. Two poets from Bloodaxe’s multigenerational list: Selima Hill, whose first Bloodaxe collection, A Little Book of Meat, appeared in 1993, and Hannah Lowe, thirty years younger, who published her debut, Chick, with Bloodaxe in 2013.

As well as continuing to publish and support poets we’ve published for many years, we’ve played our part in the diversification of British poetry, which began for us back in the 1980s with the publication of E.A. Markham’s seminal anthology Hinterland – soon made an Open University set text – including poets Bloodaxe went on to publish: James Berry, Kamau Brathwaite, Fred D’Aguiar, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Grace Nichols, Olive Senior.

Thirty years ago, in 1991, Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers – rejected by the London poetry publishers – was our first debut collection by a poet of colour. In the course of the next decade, Imtiaz Dharker was first published in the UK by Bloodaxe; other poets joining her on the Bloodaxe list included John Agard, Moniza Alvi, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Jack Mapanje and Benjamin Zephaniah.

Our international list was expanded to include Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Martin Carter from Guyana, Tishani Doshi and Arundhathi Subramaniam from India, and Elizabeth Alexander (Obama’s inaugural poet) and Patricia Smith from the US. Debut collections followed from Bernardine Evaristo (Lara, rewritten and expanded after its original publisher folded), Amali Gunasekera (formerly Rodrigo), Jacob Sam-La Rose, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Shazea Quraishi, and of course, Hannah Lowe.

There have also been several Bloodaxe anthologies of poets of colour, including three in the Ten series showcasing the work of 30 poets from the Complete Works mentoring scheme founded by Bernardine Evaristo and directed by Nathalie Teitler. Inspired by the Complete Works, Bloodaxe and NCLA (Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts) launched the James Berry Poetry Prize this spring, the first poetry award in the UK to offer both mentoring and book publication. The three equal winners of the inaugural prize, Kaycee Hill, Marjorie Lotfi and Yvette Siegert, will be mentored over the next year by Malika Booker, Mimi Khalvati and Mona Arshi, and will see their debut book-length collections published by Bloodaxe in 2023.