Things usually move pretty slowly in poetry world. Not at all surprisingly, of course, given that an awful lot of editors and publishers are doing the job purely because of their love of it, and anyway one pleasant side-effect of all this is that you sometimes get unexpected surprises in the post, getting replies from magazines you’d long forgotten about submitting poems to, or even better, getting a copy of said publication with your poems inside.
Just that happened to me yesterday. There was a bulky envelope waiting on the doormat, which turned out to contain The Slab (Slab v.3 – Slab Of Fun), a Hull-based anthology that appears at periodic intervals. All sorts of production problems had delayed the release of this edition, so I’d sort of forgotten that I’d had a couple of poems – Searching For The North West Passage and Watching The Wheatears – accepted for it.
Slab’s the right word, too. It’s a hefty paperback, jam-packed full of poetry and reviews, and as well as my two offerings, there are poems by the likes of Ian McMillan, Geoff Hattersley, Peter Sansom and David HW Grubb, as well as a lot of well-known small press names. It’s fair to say that there’s a strong flavour of northern anecdotalism, but then I like that, once in a while, when it’s done well.
On my cursory flick-through so far, I liked McMillan’s poems, and the work by Geoff Stevens and Naomi Foyle.
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