Contributors

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is a retired mathematician and thus is able to spend more time writing poetry. His latest collection is Tradesman's Exit (Shoestring 2009). With Nancy Mattson he runs the Poetry in the Crypt reading series in Islington.

Robert Chandler’s translations of Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire are published in the Everyman series. His translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Aleksander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. He is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and the author of Alexander Pushkin (in the Hesperus ‘Brief Lives’ series).

Martyn Crucefix’s new collection, Hurt, will be appearing from Enitharmon in 2010. His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Enitharmon 2006) was shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. For more about him, visit: www.poetrypf.co.uk/martyncrucefixpage.html or www.writersartists.net/crucefix.htm 

Anna Dear teaches English and Drama in the West Midlands, and also runs writing workshops for carers for the National Extension College. She has previously been published in Boomslang magazine. 

Fantin Le Flâneur was born in the East End of London in 1940. His father was a painter, the son of an Italian immigrant from Tuscany, who made ice cream. His gifted mother was a close relative of Samuel Gompers, the cigar worker who created the American trade union movement. Le Flaneur studied art at Camberwell in the 1950s. He began playing jazz and writing seriously at the same time. His first published novel was Mike Dime. It was followed by Stickman. During the 1980s he published five books on Chinese Horoscopes. Apart from feeling he could have spent that particular decade more fruitfully, Le Flaneur writes plays and poetry as well as contributing to Private Eye, which he has done since 1963. Silvie Krin, E J Thribb and Barry Fantoni are three of his many nom de plumes.

Michael Glover is a poet and critic who writes regularly on literature and the visual arts for the Independent, the Financial Times, The Economist, and The Times of London. He is a London correspondent for ArtNews, New York, and the chief poetry critic of The Tablet. His poetry collections are: Measured Lives, Impossible Horizons, A Small Modicum of Folly, The Bead-Eyed Man, Amidst all this Debris and For the Sheer Hell of Living (San Marco Press, 2008). A new collection of poems, The Song of the Potato, is due in 2010. A novel, The Trapper, was published in 2008. He is the founding editor of The Bow-Wow Shop.

Roz Goddard’s first full collection of poetry, How to Dismantle a Hotel Room, was published in 2006. Her poetry has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4. During 2003-4 she was appointed Birmingham’s poet laureate, and she gives readings of her work across the country. She runs workshops and courses for the Arvon Foundation amongst others, and mentors individual writers. She is currently studying for an M.Phil in Writing at Glamorgan University, and works as a lead Creative Agent in the Black Country to facilitate creative programmes for school-age children. www.rozgoddard.com

John Greening's latest book Hunts: Poems 1979-2009 (Greenwich Exchange), is a selection from eleven earlier volumes. He has also published various critical studies on poets of the First World War, Yeats, Hardy, Edward Thomas, Ted Hughes and - most recently - the Elizabethan love poets.  He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2008, and is a Hawthornden Fellow for 2010.

James Harpur has published four books of poetry with Anvil Press, including his latest, The Dark Age, which won the 2009 Michael Hartnett Award. Fortune's Prisoner, a translation of the poems of Boethius, is available from the same publisher. wwwjamesharpur.com

Riccardo Held, born in 1954, is not the most senior of Venetian poets (Aldo Vianello, recently published by Anvil Press, probably holds that honour), but he is without a doubt the most visible. He won the Pier Paolo Pasolini Prize in 1985 for his first book, Per questa rilassata acida Voglia, and the even more prestigious Eugenio Montale Prize for his second, Il Guizzo irriverente dell’Azzurro, in 1996.

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance arts journalist. She has published two collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon) and Ghost Station (Salt), and has had work in many anthologies. She has also published a novel, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis), and a collection of short stories, Rothko's Red (Salt). This spring a suite of fifteen poems, The Idea of Islands, written on the west coast of Ireland, are to be published by Occasional Press accompanied by drawings from Donald Tesky, and Other Criteria is to publish Out of the Void, her collected art writings from 1990-2010.

Gabriel Levin's most recent collection of poems, The Maltese Dreambook, appeared from Anvil Press in 2008. They have also published Poems from the Diwan, his translations from the medieval Hebrew Andalusian poet, Yehuda Halevi. He lives in Jerusalem.

Marius Kociejowski, poet, essayist and travel writer, lives in London. He has published four collections of poetry, Coast (Greville Press), Doctor Honoris Causa, and Music's Bride (both Anvil Press). So Dance the Lords of Language - poems 1975-2001 was published in Canada by Porcupine's Quill in 2003. Most recently, he published The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool: A Syrian Journey (Sutton Publishing) and an anthology, Syria through Writers' Eyes (Eland), and has completed a second travel book, The Pigeon Wars of Damascus and a collection of short prose, essays and feuilletons, Synchronicity and Tobacco Smoke, both as yet unpublished. Currently he is working on a new book, God's Zoo, a record of a world journey through London, through its exile and émigré artists, writers and musicians.

John Mole is a poet, reviewer and jazz clarinettist. His most recent collections are The Other Day and, for children, This is The Blackbird, both published by Peterloo.  In the Spring of 2011 a new collection, The Point of Loss, will appear from Enitharmon. He has written the libretto for a community opera, Alban, premiered in St. Albans Cathedral in May 2009, which will be performed in London later this year, and at South Carolina’s Spoleto Festival in 2011. As well as working as a teacher before taking early retirement, he was  for many years, co-editor, with Peter Scupham, of The Mandeville Press. Currently resident poet for the Poet in the City project, he can be heard reading on The Poetry Archive from which a CD of his work is also available. 

Philip Morre lives in Venice, and has translated mainly from the Italian, although he has also produced versions of poems by Guy Goffette and Philippe Jaccottet. Two translations from Montale (one previously published in the first issue of The Bow-Wow Shop) appear in his newly published Rack Press pamphlet, Here's to the Home Country, which is reviewed elsewhere in this issue.

Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953 and grew up mostly in Liverpool. His recent publications include Spirits of the Stair: Selected Aphorisms (2009), published by Shearsman Books, who also publish his most recent collection, The Look of Goodbye: Poems 2001-2006 (2008). A new volume of literary criticism, Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible (2010) has just appeared from Liverpool University Press, and this spring Two Rivers Press will publish English Nettles and Other Poems, a limited edition of twenty-two poems written since his return from many years of teaching in Japan, with illustrations by the artist Sally Castle.

Norm Sibum has been writing and publishing poetry for over forty years. Born in Oberammergau in 1947, he grew up in Germany, Alaska, Missouri, Utah, and Washington before moving to Vancouver in 1968.He has published several volumes of poetry in Canada and England. He currently lives and works in Montreal.

Originally from Leicester, Helen Tookey currently lives in Liverpool. A poetry pamphlet, Telling the Fractures (Axis, 2008), a collaboration with photographer Alan Ward, is available direct from the publisher’s website: (www.axisgraphicdesign.co.uk). She has recently co-edited (with Bryan Biggs) Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World, a collection of essays and creative writing celebrating the centenary of Wirral-born writer Malcolm Lowry. She has poems forthcoming in PN Review and Poetry Wales.

Ann Wroe is the Obituaries and Briefings Editor of The Economist. She has written five books: Lives, Lies and the Iran-Contra Affair (I.B. Tauris, 1991); A Fool and His Money: Life in a Partitioned Medieval Town (Cape, 1995); Pilate: the Biography of an Invented Man (Cape, 1999), which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize and the W.H. Smith award; and Perkin: A Story of Deception (Cape, 2003). Her fifth book, Being Shelley, was published last year by Cape. She is the co-author, with Keith Colquhoun, of The Economist Book of Obituaries, published this autumn by Profile.