WELCOME TO THE BOWSTRING POETRY WEBSITE WHERE YOU CAN LEARN ABOUT US AND ABOUT OUR BOOKS ...
Welcome to Bowstring Poetry
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Chris Hardy's collection Sermon On Mount Helikon will be published by
Bowstring Poetry in 2026, having originally been accepted and edited for
Shoestring Press by the late John Lucas in 2025. Mount Helikon, near Delphi in
Greece, is the mythical home of the Muses and Keats’s ‘blushful Hippocrene’.
it is also where Hesiod, the first poet in the Western tradition, had his
farm. 
Chris Hardy has travelled widely and now lives in Sussex. He is a
musician and prizewinning poet, (National Poetry Competition, Live Canon,
McLellan etc), whose poems have been published widely in print and online,
in the UK and elsewhere. Sermon On Mount Helikon
will be his sixth collection, his previous one being Key to the Highway
(Shoestring 2021)Return to book list Return to welcome page
Kathryn Daszkiewicz’s forthcoming collection is entitled
Widdershins. The word – which means moving counter-clockwise like
the moon, backward to go forward – is sometimes seen as sinister, but can
also provide a different, rich perspective of what has been learned and,
perhaps, the sense of a hex being lifted. Many of these poems came together after a time of crisis and counselling,
leading to an exploration of Jung. Past fixations and difficulties are
reassessed in the light of a diagnosis undisclosed for five decades. Kathryn Daszkiewicz has been described as a poet of ‘understatement and almost scalpel-like precision’ and a ‘forensically observational poet of the natural world’. The voice in this new collection of poems is undeniably hers.
Carole Coates's forthcoming collection from Bowstring Poetry is
Letters for John which was accepted by John Lucas for Shoestring
Press in 2025 but, sadly, John died in September and the Press closed. The
book, although complete in itself, is a companion to Dead Letters,
poems addressed to her late husband, and Carol Ann Duffy has said of it,
‘Coates is philosopher as much as poet, building her letters to the dead
into a subtle meditation on body and soul. This is a quietly heroic
project where death, gracefully, is not permitted the last word.’ Of the
newer collection Letters for John, Carol Ann Duffy said, ‘A gentle and
civilised marriage is burnished and reclaimed as grief recedes into
humour, memory and the wisdom that heals’ and 'This is an enthralling and necessary project'Carole Coates has published six collections and a pamphlet with Shoestring Press and a pamphlet with Wayleave Press. A late starter in poetry, she published two academic books in an earlier career.
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Drawn from Matthew Barton's previous four published collections, together with new poems and a previously unpublished sequence about the sexual abuse suffered by his mother, Singing Lessons testifies to a lifetime’s work in poetry, both as writer and as teacher of the craft in schools, prison and universities. Twice winner of the BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year and many other prizes, recipient of an Arts Council Writer’s Award and a Hawthornden Fellowship, and co-founder and -editor of Raceme magazine, Matthew Barton’s work has long been preoccupied with our problematic human place in the world, our relationships with nature and with each other, with utterance itself, and not least with our own mortality.‘Poetry of real class…a nuanced eye… His ability to select the apposite phrase or word, the richness of his diction, his subtle observations…result in highly individual poems edging into a spiritual/philosophical view of how objects and beings inhabit the world, or, indeed, how the world inhabits them.’ Belinda Cooke, Agenda.
‘A honed-down art that makes each word count…a remarkable felicity of phrasing that takes one by surprise.’ Roger Caldwell, London Grip.
‘If it can be said of a poet that he has perfect pitch, this has to be true of Barton, who hits the right note every time. This really is a sparkling, accomplished collection.’ Maurice Rutherford on Vessel.
‘Matthew Barton’s poems bring an extraordinary quality of attention to creatures, things and people…He uses his considerable skills with rhythm, pitch and image not so much to transform things as to return them, with human value added, to themselves.’ Philip Gross.
Identified Flying Objects looks at life-changing events of a personal nature – broken
legs, heart transplants, bereavements – and also considers larger
scale upheavals like invasions, liberations or revolutions. Such
happenings may be preceded by warnings that go unheeded;
and the poems reflect the regrettable
human tendency to ignore well-founded predictions by
offering contemporary responses to verses
from the Biblical prophet Ezekiel. Reviews have appeared in The High Window, Misfit Magazine, London Grip, Compulsive Reader and Litter Magazine
In Vision on Platform 2, Nancy Mattson reflects on
what has shaped her as a woman and poet - a Canadian childhood,
life and love in contemporary England, art, nature, family, faith.
The stories she tells - real and imagined - involve many
contrasting times and places, and question how memories can be
retrieved. Her voice is sensual, wise and honest in exploring
mother-daughter relationships and female friendships - yet she
often adopts other voices - male soldiers, Finnish hunters, a
mediaeval Flemish painter and habitues of a St Petersburg bar
among many others. 
Carole Coates's Dead Letters was published by Shoestring
Press in 2023 and contains poems addressed to her late husband.Words. How you loved them. So have I
and this gift of consciousness – both
to see and say the hugger-mugger, muddy
shining world, the shit and silver of it.’
(Dead Letters (xxv) .
Steven Lovatt, writing in The Friday Poem says “Though our modern, secular lives and our behaviour be ‘small’, Dead Letters suggests that they are nevertheless ‘Homeric’ – and that the living and the dead can be reunited, if we choose to see it, in a single ‘fabulous frieze’. If that isn’t epic, I don’t know what is.”
To order a copy of Dead Letters please email cacoates99@gmail.com with your postal address.
For more information & reviews see https://www.carolecoates.org.uk
Chris Hardy's collection Key to the Highway is reviewed on
London Grip. Wendy French observes "When reading Hardy’s work you seem to be
walking a tightrope between your world and his and both can be entered
into at any moment"To order a copy of Key to the Highway please email the author at chris.hardy303@btinternet.com giving your postal address
Chris Hardy has travelled widely and now lives in Sussex. He is a musician and prizewinning poet, (National Poetry Competition, Live Canon, McLellan etc), whose poems have been published widely in print and online, in the UK and elsewhere.
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Figuring the death of the author's wife and other friends, and his
mother's stroke, Matthew Barton's collection Dusk concerns
mortality and human connection and our often problematic
relationship with the natural world. A review can be found here
Christopher Southgate’s Losing Ithaca is his fifth collection from Shoestring. Starting from an exploration of deep and lasting grief at the death of a friend, it goes on to consider topics as diverse as a film project on the Road to Emmaus and the author’s admiration for Greta Thunberg and Garry Sobers. 
Coldharbour is Kathryn Daszkiewicz’s fourth Shoestring Press collection. In his review of the book, Neil Fulwood describes the poems as having ‘the impact of a moment of silence in a grand symphony, the hint of a memory or an idea stirring unreachably at the back of the mind’. And Sheenagh Pugh noted that ‘the awareness, indeed constant presence, of the natural world in this collection manifests as a palette of bright colours, but the dark ground on which they are enamelled is what gives it depth and heft’. ******
The Bowstring Poetry collective was formed after the closure of Shoestring Press, following the sad death of John Lucas. We are all Shoestring poets and our immediate purpose was to assist in publishing and promoting several collections which had been edited and approved by John but were still awaiting typesetting and printing. This rescue operation is currently proceeding well and our first four publications will appear in the summer of 2026 -- thanks to the professional skill and helpful guidance of Nat and Rachael Ravenlock of The Book Typesetters.
This website will maintain up to date information about Bowstring titles and will also enable readers to purchase them by contacting their authors directly. We will aim to promote our books both here and on social media by giving notice of launches and readings both in-person and on-line.
As a secondary purpose this site will act as a shop window for past publications by members of the collective.
We hope, in 2027 and beyond, to publish more new collections once we have developed our own selection and editing procedures. We cannot expect to reproduce John Lucas’s editorial skills; but are determined to develop our own standards in the spirit of John’s pursuit of excellence. Initially, however, submissions will be by invitation only and we are not open to unsolicited manuscripts.
We are most certainly not trying to be a continuation Shoestring Press. Shoestring is irreplaceable! Finding out what Bowstring will become is, at the moment, a learning process and it seems rash at this point to predict where we will be beyond the next 6-12 months!
To acknowledge our debt to John Lucas we include some tributes and reminiscences by Carole Coates and Malcolm Carson
A reminiscence by Carole Coates
Poet, critic, biographer, anthologist, literary historian. That’s how Wikipedia describes him. But to us he was the Editor and Shoestring poets mourn him. He was a great friend to poets and poetry and very loyal to those he published, and his ‘stable’ of poets remained loyal to him.
John wrote and translated over forty books: critical studies, including Dickens, John Clare, Arnold Bennett, George Crabbe ( Find him on YouTube talking about Larkin); edited several collections of critical essays and poetry; wrote five novels; social history including a fascinating study of the Fifties; co-translated a Norse saga; wrote a prize-winning travel book; wrote on whistling, cricket, his local pub…
And of course John was a poet producing six collections, one of which Studying Grosz on the Bus won the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize. And an amazing polymath. He was noted for other things – his extraordinary handwriting which took years to learn to decipher, his suspicion of the Internet which seems quite prescient now, his dislike of certain common words in his poets’ work. I wasn’t allowed to use ‘soft’ and I never do now. He spent quite some time on trains to attend his poets’ readings. I persuaded him to introduce a Zoom launch of mine in Lockdown. He hated doing it, but he did do it. I can’t think of anyone like John Lucas. I was so lucky to know him.
John Lucas – A Personal Memoir by Malcolm Carson
I first met John at Nottingham University where I was a mature student in 1968. He and Pauline, with Ben and Emma, had just returned from a visiting lectureship in America. It was instantly apparent how easy he was to talk to despite the awe he was held in by the younger students. I was a regular contributor to the English Department’s Poetry Programme which was edited by Hugh Underhill and then Chris Bridge. Meetings were held in a Nottingham pub to discuss each issue. These were salutary sessions as each poem was scrupulously looked at. I remember I was very proud of a sort of love poem I’d written, heavily influenced by too much reading of Lorca – I’ve never written one since! John in particular was scathing of the dreadfully romantic images which prompted me to challenge him: ‘You don’t like this, do you?’ To which he replied: ‘No, I don’t actually!’
I cringe now writing this but it taught me to stand aside from my writing and view it from a critical standpoint. In fact, that was the first time that aspect of John was apparent to me. He became a dear friend from then until his death, but friendship did not impede his critical judgement. Even receiving the edited proofs of my last collection with his deletions and suggestions just before his death, I had to justify why I disagreed with him or conversely see why he was right. Such a lesson was invaluable.
John’s reputation had preceded him for our year, so we were intrigued as to whether his lectures were as we’d been promised. I remember him being ‘miffed’ that his favourite period of the nineteenth century novel had been taken by another member of staff, but at least we heard his wonderful lectures on Wordsworth. (This was at a time when he must have been finishing his brilliant book on his beloved Dickens, The Melancholy Man.) On one occasion, he was reading from Michael when the door was burst open by a student with a dog on a piece of string which she’d ‘rescued’ wandering around the campus. Needless to say, John’s reaction was not sympathetic to the plight of the dog or the consideration of the student.
The department had a football team – the Sunday Academicals – which played on a Sunday morning by the banks of the Trent. We were a motley crew but were augmented by the occasional talented engineer. John was a commanding presence at centre half, unafraid to inflict pain on an unsuspecting, and fitter, 18-year-old, and I was the goalkeeper of sorts. We were very serious about our endeavours despite not being very good. One of the staff, fifty-year old Allan Rodway, a Critical Theorist, played on the right wing, but a gust of wind would have blown him away. On one occasion, George Parfitt, a lethal left back with a huge mane of ginger hair and deadly studs, had to go through to Allan’s room as he was conducting a tutorial to ask Alan to stop kicking a ball against the wall as it was interfering with his Hardy tutorial. However, the post-match debriefings in the Royal Oak in Beeston would put to shame those of any premiership team, accompanied by pints of Shipstone’s bitter and cigarettes, or in John’s case, Henry Wintermann’s cigars. In fact, the Royal Oak played an important role in our social life in Beeston. John’s elegy for it – Closing Time at the Royal Oak – is a masterpiece of pub social history. He was on very friendly terms with many of the locals and particularly the landlord, Chris Christmas. On one occasion John mentioned to a regular that the university was hosting a real ale festival with a range of beers from around the country. Bear in mind, this was a Shipstone’s pub, one of three Nottingham breweries. When he saw the chap later, he asked him if he’d managed to get to the festival. ‘Oh yes,’ was the reply. ‘I had a lovely pint of Shipstone’s.’
It was about this time that John and Allan set up the Byron Press, I suppose a forerunner of Shoestring. They published a number of beautifully produced pamphlets as well as a few collections. The pamphlets I have are by: Ian Fletcher – a huge influence on John – Madge Hales, Betty Parvin, John himself (About Nottingham), B. S. Johnson, Michael Waters, Ernest Frost, Barry Cole, Philip Callow, George Johnston, Wes Magee and John Mackendrick. The collections: Two Poets (Allan Rodway and Malcolm Bradbury), Philip Appleman, G.S. Fraser, and Ralph Robin. Shoestring later published a number of these as well as Arnold Rattenbury’s brilliant pamphlet The Frigger Makers.
In 2003 John began a publishing a series of selected poems by five different poets, Take Five, under the Shoestring Press banner. The idea was, I think, to give a voice to poets who were perhaps not ready for a full collection but who deserved to be heard. I was lucky to be one of the first five along with Ann Atkinson, Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, George Parfitt and Deborah Tyler-Bennett. We did launches in each of our bases which John came to. He was always assiduous about supporting his poets at their launches whenever he could. Take Five was huge success and gave rise to three or four more selections of five.
As many readers will know, Shoestring grew considerably from this period with John refusing to consider applying for an Arts Council grant partly because of the hurdles placed in the way. He continued to act independently throughout, still maintaining the stance of supporting poets who were unfashionable but worth being heard. In this he was influenced by Harry Chambers who ran a similar publishing company in Cornwall, Peterloo Poets. After Harry’s death, John’s role became even more important. It’s astonishing, looking back, to think of the amount of time, money and effort he must have put into this unique undertaking. He had an excellent relationship with the staff at Beeston Post Office who must have been used to John coming in to post numerous cards, letters, drafts to poets and review copies to a range of magazines.
John’s love of jazz is well documented, in particular Ken Colyer’s playing. This was reflected in his funeral service where ‘Going Down’ was the moment for reflection, followed by ‘Potato Head Blues’ by Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five as we dispersed, a joyful number to remember him by. He came over to Lincolnshire to stay at my cottage in Keelby a couple of times, and we went to Louth where the South Wold Jazz Band played. The band was fronted by John Padden, a tractor salesman, who played cornet sitting down with his legs crossed. The band was unashamedly New Orleans, which suited John admirably, but even he was amused at the ‘authenticity’ of recreating New Orleans in rural Lincolnshire. He was even more amused when I told him that I’d once gone to Boston Jazz Club with John Padden who was driving his minivan across the wide Wolds roads while playing his cornet and driving with his knees. John and I kept in touch through letters and cards – notorious for his deteriorating handwriting – and occasional visits to Beeston. Lowdham Book Festival was a great occasion, and I recall his broaching the issue of Shoestring continuing in a conversation with Kathy Daszkiewicz and myself when he envisaged it ceasing with his death.
Everyone, I am sure will have their own memories of John. The affection and respect he was held in is beautifully captured in Strike Up the Band, Poems for John Lucas at 80, excellently edited by Merryn Williams. Conversely, his 2024 The Moon Looks on Them All, of friends and friendship is a superb and touching account of many of the people who have been important to him. The account of his dear friend Barry Cole is hilarious.
My last contact with John was a phone call just before he died. He had come out of hospital after his altercation with a Nottingham tram. His death was a huge shock to me, as I’m sure it was to many. His influence still remains in terms of values and judgements, and the absence of his friendship is still felt. After all, we were friends for 57 years.
But then we have his poems, his critical works, his social memoirs, his books on cricket, travel and the art of whistling, and latterly his excellent novels as ‘England’s oldest debut novelist,’ as he told me with the publishing of Waterdrops.
That’ll do.
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| Vision on Platform 2 by Nancy Mattson |
 by Christopher Southgate |
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