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Faber New Poets

At the start of this year a new Arts Council-funded initiative was announced - the prestigious poetry press Faber were to release a series of pamphlets by young poets, influenced by the continuing success of tall-lighthouse's Pilot series, edited by Roddy Lumsden.

Like the Pilot series, each poet receives editorial input and a pamphlet of their poems is published, but the Faber scheme also offers some financial help for the poets.

Now, the first pamphlets in the series are scheduled to be published in early October of this year. And the selected poets - Fiona Benson (pamphlet cover pictured above), Heather Phillipson, Toby Martinez de las Rivas and Jack Underwood - seem to represent a fair cross-section of the type of poetry emerging from this new generation of poets; unusual, edgy, contemporary and occasionally free-wheeling... hard to say anything substantial here without going into great detail (and even that would only be based on the handful of poems I've seen by these poets in magazines). Needless to say, they promise to make for interesting reading alongside the Pilot series, and will be worth checking out.

2010 will see the next four poets in the Faber series also published - Joe Dunthorne, Annie Katchinska, Sam Riviere and Tom Warner. Of these, I'll be especially interested to see Sam Riviere's pamphlet, particularly if it includes poems as strong as his second place winner in the 2008 Poetry London competition.

Where the Pilot scheme is concerned, talented young poets Charlotte Runcie and Richard O'Brien (both editors of the fine Pomegranate magazine) are also due launch their pamphlets in October, following on from the March launch of Amy Key's instead of stars and Sarah Howe's a certain chinese encyclopaedia. In related news, I'll also be reading at a tall-lighthouse event, "tall reflections", in Cambridge on the 15th September, along with Alan Buckley and invited guest readers. Do come along if you're able.