Primers Volume One

In 2015, The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press launched a nationwide scheme to find exciting new voices in poetry with Kathryn Maris and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, a final four poets emerged as clear choices: Geraldine Clarkson, Lucy Ingrams, Maureen Cullen and Katie Griffiths.
Primers: Volume One now collects together a taster of poems from each of the four new poets. The brilliant chemistry of their poems proves to be a heady mix and a memorable journey – from post-war correspondents to foster families, breath-taking natural landscapes to strange, unsettling dream-like narratives and so much more in between. There's plenty here to delight and dazzle, and ample evidence of a bright future ahead for contemporary poetry, as these striking and bold new voices demonstrate.

Geraldine Clarkson lives in Warwickshire and is the author of three poetry pamphlets, including a Laureate's Choice and a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet choice. She has won the Poetry London and Ambit competitions, as well as the Magma Editors' and Anne Born prizes, and has been commended in the National Poetry, Arvon, and Mslexia competitions. Her poems have been published widely in UK journals including The Poetry Review and The Rialto, in anthologies such as Best British Poetry (Salt, 2014), Best New British and Irish Poets (Eyewear Books, 2018) and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, 2019. Geraldine has spent many years involved in teaching refugees and migrants, as well as in admin, secretarial, office-cleaning, library, and care work, and her writing is influenced by her Irish roots and a formative period spent in a silent monastic order, including some years in South America.