Steve Ely

Orasaigh is a collaboration between poet Steve Ely and photographer Michael Faint, inspired by the landscape around the tidal island of Orasaigh, located on the coast of South Uist at Boisdale.Ely's visionary poem, whilst always remaining anchored in the island, roams widely, exploring a range of themes related to Uist and the wider world - sea level rise, the crisis of the 'sixth extinction', history, culture, politics, conflict, and class. Faint's powerful photographs vividly capture the spirit of the place, creating an independent yet complementary subjectivity.The work of the two artists combines and interacts to produce a uniquely evocative response to a rich and resonant landscape in a work that affirms the vitality and resilience of the human spirit, with the island itself becoming a dual symbol of precarity and hope in the crisis of the Anthropocene.

Lives of British Shrews is an formally innovative poem designed to reflect the daily activity cycles of the three species of British shrew - Common, Pygmy and Water. Anchored in soricine ecology, the poem nevertheless roams wildly, with its exploration of the fierce and implacable eros of shrews providing portals into other themes and content, including human nature, autobiography, capitalism, the Anthropocene and war.

"The poems in this book are improvisations arising from contemplative readings of four chapters of the 1611 edition of the King James Bible-Matthew VI, Mark V, Luke XV and Luke X. Lectio Violant-'profane reading'-is the name I've coined to describe this process, alluding to Lectio Divina-'divine reading'-the long-established Catholic practice of devotional reading, the purpose of which is to draw the reader closer to God by enabling a fuller experience of scripture. I'm not sure this book's doing the same thing, although you never know." -Steve Ely

I've played, watched and loved football all my life. Along with birds and birding it is my most enduring passion. So I thought I'd write about it. My original intention was to write a poetic history of football, from the creation to the present day. I started fluently, but one thing and another got in the way and the footballing Muse abandoned me after about twenty poems. The poems in this chapbook are those of the original twenty that made it through the selection process and got into the first eleven. Plus a sub. Messi comes last, but it is definitely not him. (Steve Ely)

Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God brings together for the first time Steve Ely's recent poetry about violence. Addressing content that includes the First World War, the Falklands War, the Rwandan genocide, gangland vendettas, the violence of children and the process of colonialization that established the British state, Ely rejects simplistic responses, seeking rather to expose and understand the roles and causes of violence. Informed by a wide-ranging vision that takes in Pharaonic Egypt, York Castle, coal mining, American prison gangs, the Geneva Bible, neo-Nazi extremism, the Balkans' conflict and the English education system, the book's survey of human savagery ultimately finds hope in the potential of ordinary people to resist injustice and the coercive state.

Ted Hughes's South Yorkshire tells the untold story of Hughes's Mexborough period (1938-1951) and demonstrates conclusively that Hughes's experiences in South Yorkshire in town and country, educationally, in literature and love were decisive in forming him as the poet of his subsequent fame.