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The Smug Bridegroom
Five Leaves Press, 2002
PO Box 81, Nottingham NG5 4ER
ISBN 0 907123 88 0
£6.99

Robert Hamberger
I’m proud to be writing outside the mainstream, and to be linked to other alternative voices. Peter Redgrove wrote: ‘Nor could I falsify my material in the interests of a marketable product. I had to write as the poem wanted me to write.’ I’m aware that my poetry could be viewed as unfashionable, but irony bores me and I try to write as simply as I can. I use the experiences of fatherhood and sonhood, marriage, separation, the loss of friends, my gay identity as frameworks to examine the big themes of memory, love and death. For over fifteen years I’ve enjoyed experimenting with the sonnet, using that form (as Anne Sexton says) because ‘some poems are too difficult to write without controls of some sort’. I find much contemporary mainstream English poetry like tepid bath-water, so usually return to hotter American examples like Whitman, Dickinson, St. Vincent Millay, Plath, Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker,Mark Doty, Sharon Olds and Louise Gluck, and past greats like John Clare, Hopkins, Edward Thomas, Lorca and Neruda. I’m aware of the politics of publishing: why something gets accepted or promoted and another vision ignored. I don’t underestimate the difficulties of staying true to your voice, but usually poetry insists there’s no other option. I believe that alternative voices (Black, Asian and dual heritage writers, working-class writers, lesbian, gay and transsexual writers) can either collude with self-censorship by silencing themselves or speak up, claim the page and their own limelight from the margins: by writing make their words take centre-stage.

Ross Bradshaw, Editor of Five Leaves Press
Five Leaves publishes 8-10 books per annum. Virtually everything is by commission rather than submission. www.fiveleaves.co.uk