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Featuring 25 poems which break the rules – starting with the no-more-than-40-lines rule. If you’ve ever considered putting a poem in for a competition or an anthology, you know what we are talking about.

These poems are long.

They take their time.

They tell a story, sometimes in a straightforward purposeful way, sometimes in a roundabout oblique way, but somewhere there is a thread of narrative woven through.

Long, narrative, but by no means traditional poems, by contemporary voices.

What started as a complaint about the ‘40-line rule’ in much of the poetry world has turned into an anthology that not only breaks that rule, but stomps all over it.

Themes both great and small are explored in narrative poems that pack a punch. Human interactions from conversation, storytelling, lending and borrowing, theft, prayer, memory, shopping and a long walk, right through to sexuality, time travel, truce negotiations, disappearance, natural disaster, violence and death are all explored, many of them rooted in landscape and place. These lie alongside equally rooted mythological and historical tales drawn from Greece, Turkey, Africa, Scandinavia and Britain.

What draws all these themes together is the strength of the storytelling. Emotions as diverse as frustration, disappointment, embarrassment, hope, nostalgia, anger, and fear are channelled through spectacular poetry in many different forms into truly satisfying work.

A narrative invasion of your brain like thistleseed across northern borders or bees through sleep . A strong freshening wind trembling out of long forgotten valleys and across the face of anyone sitting outside their cave, crosslegged, paying attention. They are fables made flesh, a barrage of artistic light that breaks surface with an oily sheen. Have faith, reader. Enter this book. It is a garden gate swung wide open.

George Wallace

The Poets: