And today we celebrate the publication of the eBook ‘Pressed Flowers’ poetry anthology pamphlet – happy days! To get your copy click here.
Video of ‘Speaking with Flowers’
To celebrate the forthcoming eBook version of ‘Pressed Flowers’ click here to see contributor Sarah Leavesley aka Sarah James YouTube video of ‘Speaking with Flowers’ featured in the pamphlet.
New Author Jordan A. Daniels
Watching Grandma is Jordan’s first book for small children and describes how his Grandma came to Britain and the difference it made to family life.
£7.00 +P&P
UK customers can get their copy here: 
Non-UK customers can get their copy here:
About the author
Born in Birmingham, England Jordan is a junior doctor training in mental health. Jordan comes from a big family with a mum and dad, an older brother, whom he shares a birthday with, and two younger brothers.
He has liked drawing since he was very little. Jordan liked anatomy classes when studying to be a doctor, where he was able to draw parts of the body. He recently had artwork published for a flier produced for Arts in the Yard based in Yardley, where he grew up.
When not at work, Jordan can be found playing trumpet with friends, teaching piano or playing organ at church. He also enjoys composing songs and writes poetry on the bus. For exercise, which, he says, is both fun and important, he does rock climbing and coaches fencing which he started at school.
Jordan also thinks that speaking other languages is fun and has learned to speak German. He can manage a few words in French, Italian, Jamaican Patois and Japanese. Going to Japan would be his next big adventure!
Jordan spent a lot of time with his grandparents growing up and found their love and depth of character to be very inspiring. That it is why he wanted to write a story dedicated to his first niece showing what it means to care for someone who you love.
Merry Christmas 2019
2019 Anthologies here in time for Christmas!
A new Millie story from Madeleine Ridd
‘Millie is excited – it’s almost Sports Day! But will an unexpected visitor stop her winning the big race?’
Read about Millie’s sports day experience in this beautifully illustrated book for children by Madeleine Ridd. Madeleine is a cellist and music teacher. She lives in East London with her husband, Nick. Madeleine has always loved to paint, and this is her second children’s book.
Available direct from Black Pear Press via PayPal.
£7.00 +P&P
UK customers:
Non-UK customers:
UK postage x3 copies
Non-UK postage x3 copies
‘Pressed Flowers’
A wonderful, touching launch evening with all the poets who wrote for Pressed Flowers. This anthology of poems is a gorgeously uplifting collection of poetry from poets in Worcestershire and beyond. Pressed Flowers, collated by Worcestershire Poet Laureate 2019 Charley Barnes in cahoots with Polly Stretton of Black Pear Press is full of joy and beauty.
Get your copy of Pressed Flowers direct from Black Pear Press here:
£5.00 +P&P
UK customers:
Non-UK customers:
Congratulations on two great reviews
The Stations of the Day is receiving good reviews—our sincere congratulations to Michael W. Thomas.
Reviews
Review published by The Writers’ Corner
Michael W. Thomas, The Stations of the Day
Written by Crossroads Published 28th October 2019
ISBN 978-1-910322-97-0 64pp, paperback, gloss covers £7.00
Publication date: October 2019
In this, his tenth title, Michael W. Thomas again justifies Alison Brackenbury’s commendation of his work:
‘His poems are rich with the details of past and present lives. They explore the wildest possibilities of those lives with passion and humour.’
The Stations of the Day is in fact a book of mini-collections, with titles as diverse as ‘When You Were Young’, ‘Where Nothing’s Asked Or Thieved’ and ‘Motley Futures.’ Within these and others, using a striking variety of forms and voices, Thomas’s poetry ranges back and forth in time, place and emotion. Here we find the English Black Country when it was still industrial; there we find Feste from Twelfth Night, who confides what Shakespeare did not record. Now we have nature and peace in our grasp at a country crossroads on Christmas Day; now we land on College Drive, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, as drivers and wanderers chart their routes from one station of the day to the next. Elsewhere, children of the future laugh like drains at the yammer-drug that is social media in our time; while one small boy, confined to a barber’s chair at the end of autumn 1960, senses time’s flow and wonders what on earth it can possibly lead to. In this, among Thomas’s speakers and characters, he is far from alone.
Arresting in language, sharp in perspective, The Stations of the Day invites and rewards reading and reading again.
‘Michael W. Thomas’s poetry shows a real sense of exploration and discrimination of fine states of feeling…. Thomas cuts away all dead weight, creating a sense of economy with richness, and is not afraid of using a phrase that in a lesser craftsman’s hands would bring a sneer…. His language is vigorous and street-wise and his poetic tools work on experience in Coleridgean mode, dissolving, diffusing, dissipating in order to create a surprising world.’
–Peter de Ville, Poetry Salzburg Review.
London Grip Poetry Review – Michael W Thomas
October 25, 2019 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
Merryn Williams casts an eye over a new collection by Michael W Thomas
The Stations of the Day Michael W. Thomas Black Pear Press ISBN 978-1-910322-97-0 64 pp £7
Although this is a very recent collection, the sequence ‘When you were Young’ takes us back to the 1960s, a Catholic upbringing, and school English lessons where children were taught about skylarks, foreign fields and the Charge of the Light Brigade. That’s what a whole generation thought poetry was. It doesn’t appeal to Michael Thomas, whose work is distinctively modern. To demonstrate this I can’t do better than quote the whole of ‘Harbours Hill’, with its shock opening:
One day I shall return to Harbours Hill and die. On its only street cambered, gritted the colour of headache, against the fall of January stars I shall let my eyes roll back to see what my mind makes of the last quaint shuffle of life …. having looked in the window of the village’s one shop, how it gathers little marvels of winter light on stuff it never sells …. having walked the greenish length of the path beside the unattended church to see the berries drowse in their blood between the railing-spikes…. having stood in the church itself In case the breathing dust should work loose a word from a long-immured prayer. On the only street at the mouth of the path I shall set like a tumbler, my bones brewing a forward roll so when it comes I fold soundlessly, ball up where the railings meet scarps of moss. Mulch to mulch preserved a while as a randomness of sockets till the grasses of spring fill my eyes, lush over the whitened nooks in which a passenger spirit might once have bided its time.
This is a powerful poem which speaks, if I understand it rightly, about the loss of religion and a deadly boring childhood.
In the last but one section, ‘Endpapers’, Thomas contemplates, ‘the slowing of your blood’. ‘Time’s clock’ ‘flips back to zero’. We’re all getting older, and the future may be frightening, but the poet can still derive pleasure from the sight of a child being pushed in a buggy.
There are several very melancholy poems here, but Thomas is actually an amusing writer, and concludes with a sequence, ‘Feste Packs’ which gives a new slant on the cast of Twelfth Night.
If you’d like a copy of your own, follow this link.
