A tribute to Arc Publications

The year my last collection came out, I was house-sitting on an enormous old estate in Spain surrounded by asphodels and olive trees. It was a 45 minute drive to the main road.  I looked after sheep and weeded a courtyard of lemon trees and roses. It was a season out of time, my first and possibly last time house-sitting. Asphodels were everywhere, a lamb was born, wild goats fought in front of the house. 

A few months later I launched A Friable Earth. Lucky to have a publisher, lucky to have had a chance to spend a month in the kind of place only millionaires see. But we were all on the brink. Looking back to that year, 2019, it feels as if I was awarded a pause before the book was out, time to gather a sense of self before the upheaval of Covid. 

Tony Ward

Five years on, almost to the day, with a new collection of poems on my desktop, I am now looking for a new publisher. Arc, who've published all but one of my collections since 1995, is scaling back. Tony Ward, publisher, and his business partner Angela Jarman, have worked for decades giving poets from all over the world the opportunity to be read in English.
When Tony began Arc, he printed the books himself. In the early days he published books by Ivor Cutler, Adrian Henri, Rose Auslander. Later, the French poet Valerie Rouzeau, and among recent releases are poems by Karl Marx, Polish poet Aneta Kaminska and Nobel prize winner Nellie Sachs. Arc's new focus is on chapbooks. 

On that estate, clearing water channels that were part of a great irrigation scheme introduced by African settlers a thousand years earlier, I went days without speaking to anyone. Then visitors, then solitude. 

Poetry is a tenuous activity. I had no idea, really, how lucky I was to have a publisher, let alone one with a international perspective. It's a word that courts debate, followers, imitation. It's a word a lot of people want to be associated with and from time to time, someone suggests there's too much poetry being published. 

Angela Jarman

But I like what the poet Stephanie Norgate wrote in 2009, "Poetry is one of the most diverse art forms there is." She quoted another poet from the deep south west, Charles Causley, who said, "there can never be too many artists."

Thankfully there are still poetry publishers, like Arc, who are committed to an art form that refuses to be hemmed in and individuals like Tony Ward and Angela Jarman who've made it the work of a lifetime to keep that diversity at the heart of what they do.