Seahorse Publications
New Publications:
‘Breathe In’ is a collection of contrasts; with a scope both modest and ambitious, local and international, street-wise and philosophical. There is an overwhelming feeling, as you navigate through its delicately curated pages, that you are experiencing a life in motion – not a mundane archiving of material but a vibrant rekindling of significant moments. This juxtaposition of works from across decades creates an enjoyable friction between the pieces, lending the whole collection a unique temporal electricity. An invitation to Breathe In and connect with our past selves, Dolan’s work deserves to be appreciated by an audience as diverse as his inspiration.’
(Kevin P. Gilday)
Available October 26th
Mairi Jack
1953-2022
Mairi was born and raised in Motherwell.
She had a mostly unhappy school life, but attended Langside College after leaving school and gained a place in Glasgow University where she studied English Literature. She had been an avid reader as a child and at University she developed a lifelong love of literature and poetry. One of her lecturers was Edwin Morgan who she admired greatly and was delighted when one of her poems was included in ’The Centenary Collection’ to mark what would have been his 100th birthday.
Mairi had a career in Journalism becoming Women's Editor at Paisley Daily Express. She went on to work as a teacher supporting children with special needs. Despite a long-term ambition to pursue creative writing, this did not materialise until later in life when she finally joined an inspirational class and workshop run by Dr. Linda Jackson. Much of the work contained in this collection is the result of a surge of creative energy unleashed by these classes and the friends which she made there.
She would have been proud of this book, and it is a wonderful legacy for her family and friends.
Book available Sept 24th 2024.
We travel the world in this new collection of poems from Jenifer Harley. Surging from the global to the local, from Samoa and Sydney to a Scottish seaside bothy, her keen-eyed observation focuses us afresh on human civilisation’s grandeur, originality and beauty. But she’s also playfully aware of the everyday experience of tiny things that irk like the ouch of wearing flip-flops on a steep dirt track.
These poems are always alert to language – or, rather, languages – e.g. ‘la ragazza sooks spaghetti’ (a line from ‘Bar Gambrinus, Pisa’), capturing the vibrancy of a location’s cheerful, chaotic cacophony and colours.
A vividly perceptive collection, commemorative and celebratory, documenting life’s rough and smooth. A collection with real heart.
(Carol McKay, writer)
Available from Oct 1st.
Margaret McGrath has a way with words that transforms them into a lyrical montage of life’s trials and tribulations and the sweetness found in compassion and faith. Inner rhymes dance through her work inviting the reader to cast off any inhibition holding them back from the dreams that they seek. Humour is never far from the page. Last Tango In Denniston, is laugh out loud funny, conjuring memories of Denny Paly and brylcreemed hair. As winter approaches this is a collection to hunker down with whilst sipping a cup of creamy hot chocolate, and I can guarantee you will not look at an ironing board in quite the
same way as before.
(Donna Campbell, poet)
Book available 24th September
The past, as Neil Young declares, may be ‘no fit place to inhabit’ (too much poverty, too much war and its aftermath), but it is fertile ground for poetry for this son of Belfast. On show is a dry-eyed (and sometimes dewy-eyed) nostalgia for the (far from) ordinary lives that history overlooks, including a mantlepiece of family photographs and a mother’s collection of ‘buttons, badges, stubs/of dance-hall tickets’ stashed in a ‘childhood biscuit tin.’ Neil Young realises that we are all keepers of myths and in its way, this collection is a book of heroes – the famous and the (almost) forgotten who show us ‘what history looks like when it’s the last place to look’. By questioning the past there’s a chance we’ll forge a future worth the effort of making.
(Chris Powci)