• FIRST THINGS FIRST

There will be a book-launch for Voices from the Landscape (further info about the book below)

           on Thursday 17th October 2024 at:

• Bridge Hotel
• Castle Square
  
• Newcastle upon Tyne
  NE1 1RQ

• 7-9 pm

• Free Entry

Now, more about Mark and the new book:

This is the webpage for a brand new erbacce poet, Mark Carr...  if you wish to contact Mark just click on the cover image below to open an email.

His poetry collection (102pp) Voices from the Landscape is NOW available...

Mark is an artist who has combined prints with poetry and live-performance art with dialogue. Most of this poetry is for private reading and expression, but Mark has had work published in the Consilience Journal, won third prize in the 2013, Newcastle City Council Poetry Competition, has been long listed for inclusion in the Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine and was recently shortlisted for the erbacce-prize, with his poems included in the Spring 2024 erbacce journal. That is what led to this, his first perfect bound collection. He seems to us at erbacce to be quite a live-wire, we imagine him zapping about with a paint brush in one hand and a pen in the other possibly playing cymbals-and-drum with one foot; and he doesn’t just write poetry by the way; quite recently he completed his first novel; Cardboard City, and his first play; That Language. Like we said; busy busy busy...

​It won’t surprise you (it certainly didn’t surprise us) that Mark is also a musician, he played guitar in a retro punk band not too long ago, playing clubs, pubs and festivals across NE England. Around 2000 he started to produce and record his own music under the band name ARMCHAIRANARCHISTS, (we can’t picture him in an armchair!) which in 2013 culminated in the release of his first album ‘Corruption’. His second album, released in 2021, 'Liebe - Hata - Stultitia' (Love, Hate, Stupidity) was recorded through the ten-month period of lockdown… and the list goes on and on, he has even written two children’s musicals, which were performed in primary schools in N E England.

BUT here are his collected poems, gathered together in a stunningly beautiful collection; Voices from the Landscape.

When would-be-poets send us a proposal each of the six strong team read them ‘blind’; we don’t know if the poems were sent by Fred Bloggs or T S Elliot… the results are then sent by the team to the Senior Editor (me; Dr Alan Corkish)… when Mark's book proposal was distributed to our selection panel I had six out of six responses, all simply saying ‘yes’. That is rare. It is of little use me telling you about the poems (it is all subjective anyway), or even trying to explain why we selected them unanimously; each member of the team, people with wide experience and individual tastes, people widely published who read thousands of poems by new poets every year, all liked them... that alone should speak for itself… we suggest you read them yourself, that in the end is the only test for poetry… however I feel that these poems are different to most, they are experimental and yet not over-complex, but fragments linger, and that for me is the test of great poetry.