Simon Perril is a poet and collagist. His poetry publications include Two Duets with Occasion (Shearsman 2024), The Slip (Shearsman, 2020), In the Final Year of my 40s (Shearsman, 2018), Beneath (Shearsman, 2015) Archilochus on the Moon (Shearsman, 2013), Newton’s Splinter (Open House, 2012), Nitrate (Salt, 2010), A Clutch of Odes (Oystercatcher, 2009), and Hearing is Itself Suddenly a Kind of Singing (Salt, 2004). His poetics essay ‘Good to Think with: My Surrealism’, along with collages and poetry, have just appeared in Shuddhashar FreeVoice 37.
As a critic he has written widely on contemporary poetry, editing The Salt Companion to John James, and Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling. His article ‘On Metis: Or, what the Squid and the Octopus taught me about Practice Research’, appeared in Writing In Practice 7, 2021. He is Professor of Poetic Practice at De Montfort University, in Leicester. You can see Simon give an online reading/talk with accompanying visuals here: youtube.com/watch?v=bJoI30MzLGs
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Peter Robinson has published various books of aphorisms, fiction, and literary criticism. For some of his poetry volumes and translations he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations. His most recent collection of poems is Retrieved Attachments (Two Rivers Press) and The Collected Poems of Giorgio Bassani (translated with Roberta Antognini) published in New York by Agincourt Press. Return to Sendai: New & Selected Poems is due from MadHat Press in the USA in September 2024.
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Frances Presley was born in Derbyshire, of Dutch-Javanese and English parents, in 1952. She grew up in Lincolnshire and Somerset, and lives in London. She studied modern literature at the universities of East Anglia and Sussex. She worked as an information specialist in community development, and at the Poetry Library. She collaborated with artist Irma Irsara on a project about women’s clothing and the fashion trade, Automatic Cross Stitch (Other Press, 2000); and with poet Elizabeth James in Neither the One nor the Other (Form Books, 1999). The title sequence of Paravane: new and selected poems, 1996-2003 (Salt, 2004) was a response to 9/11 and IRA bombsites in London. Lines of Sight (Shearsman 2009) focuses on Exmoor’s Neolithic stone sites, which also feature in a collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading, Stone Settings (Odyssey, 2010). An Alphabet for Alina, with artist Peterjon Skelt, exploits the lexical and visual possibilities of an alphabet for girls (Five Seasons, 2012). Halse for hazel (Shearsman, 2014) initiates a new poetic syntax of marginal trees and languages, continued in Sallow, (Leafe Press, 2016), with images by Irma Irsara. Ada Unseen (Shearsman, 2019) concerns Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, mathematician and computer visionary, who lived on Exmoor. It was also a collaboration with Tilla Brading, ADADADA (Odyssey, 2022). Collected Poems 1973-2020 was published in two volumes by Shearsman in 2022.
Black Fens Viral (2020-) is written on a slow train through East Anglia’s flat, agricultural, landscape of black peat, once marshland. ‘Viral’ refers both to Covid and to a text generator known as the Markov chain, and its strange rearrangement of text resembles a viral assault. The first part of Black Fens Viral was published as a Literary Pocket Book (2021) by Steven Hitchins.
Presley has written various essays and reviews, especially on innovative British women poets. She has co-translated the work of two Norwegian poets, Hanne Bramness and Lars Amund Vaage. Her work is in the anthologies Infinite Difference (Shearsman, 2010), Ground Aslant: radical landscape poetry (Shearsman, 2011), Out of Everywhere2 (Reality Street, 2015), Fractured Ecologies (EyeCorner, 2020) and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World (Dispatches, 2021). She has contributed to a collection of poetic autobiographies, Cusp (Shearsman, 2012) and its London based companion volume, Clasp (Shearsman, 2015).
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Simon Smith is a poet and translator living in London. He has previously published ten collections of poetry including a selected poems and a complete Catullus translation. His latest books are Last Morning (Parlor Press, U.S.A.) and Municipal Love Poems (Shearsman Books, U.K.) both appeared as companion volumes in 2022. 2022 also saw the publication of Source (Muscaliet Press), a collaboration with artist Felicity Allen and representation of Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau ivre’. He is presently working on a book-length series of prose poems, The Magic Lantern Slides.
Between 1991 and 2007 he worked at the Poetry Library in London and taught creative writing and poetry at London South Bank University, The Open University, and the University of Kent from 2006 to 2022. He is Emeritus Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent.