Agenda Editions

Published August 2022

An exceptional debut collection by this gifted, compassionate poet whose haunting words take flight into the very soul of the reader. The elegies are so deeply felt, they could be anyone’s as the poet is summoned

from this shadow life

to open sky,

a pen to write.

As A A Marcoff says, ‘Barton sings from the whole heart’.

‘Elizabeth Barton’s poems are like the linnet’s wings she evokes in the opening piece of this stunning collection – delicate but capable of taking flight. She finds striking beauty in ordinary moments and records joy and sadness with great compassion. These poems are small inventories of what we treasure – Barton summons us from our shadow lives and gives us words to soar.’
Tamar Yoseloff

‘Elizabeth Barton has a unique voice – rooted in her love for the land, the earth, and also for her family and the father she has lost. The poems in this pamphlet are carefully crafted, and the beauty of the language, and the rare image or turn of phrase, make a music very like a song ‘rich as honeycomb’, or like a bird that is singing of the world – a world of searing grief and loss and pain, but also of ‘jasmine flowers’ and a sublime ‘iridescence’. It is through nature that she has found the words to articulate her grief over her father’s death, and to make sorrow a way of singing and an art. Barton sings from the whole heart.’

A A Marcoff

Agenda Editions is pleased to announce two new individual publications by Peter Weltner and David Pollard and an associated publication between Agenda Editions/London Magazine Editions by Patricia McCarthy

Peter Weltner: Crow-Black Stones and a Flock of Crows
A passionate, sensuous, homo-erotic yet spiritual collection from this prolific American poet, a retired Professor,
interviewed by the editor in the Ekphrastic issue of Agenda Vol 54 Nos 1-2 . W S Milne says, ‘His poems extol the virtues of the free and beautiful human being in an age of “ravaged conventions”’.
Also speaking of his poetry, Donald J Gray, Professor Emeritus of English, Indiana University, says, ‘The pleasures of memory, and the particular beauties of birds and beasts and flowers and trees and seascapes and ground fog stand always in his poetic regard and craft as not just the compensating matter of existence, but as ifs continual and commanding presence’.

David Pollard: Bird of Oblivion
A musical, moving collection, from this brilliantly established Jewish poet, based around his wife’s dementia
W S Milne, referring to Finis-terre, Pollard’s previous Agenda Edition, speaks of his ‘startling, accurate images, such lovely rhythms in its speech patterns, and repetitive echoes which unify the whole… so many layers and levels of meaning’. And the same applies to this astounding work of a poet at the height of his powers.

Patricia McCarthy: Hand in Hand
Patricia McCarthy’s original psychological take on one of the most seminal myths of all time, that of Tristan and Iseult. As in a former collection, Rodin’s Shadow, Patricia McCarthy uses dramatic techniques with a polyphony of personae. What Tim Liardet says of Rodin’s Shadow surely applies to this book: ‘I love the way the sections feed off each other and there’s a powerful sense of accrual. There are changes in pace, changes in tempo, twists in diction, all of which ensure that the register is up, the momentum brightening… and this makes for a page-turner. A highly ambitious, highly original and achieved book full of passionate endeavour’.