Val Kirkham is a Yorkshire poet now living in Lancashire. This is a collected edition of her life work so far. It is wide-ranging and varied. She knows a great deal about the pain and pleasure of love, and writes about it with searing honesty. She trained as a chef and has worked in a zoo, a banqueting outfit, a mediaeval castle, and an American college. In 1982 she decided to hang up her apron and devote herself to writing, saying she would go back to work when she got bored. She has not got bored yet. She was a performance poet in the 80s, in the North West. Adrian Henri once gasped at one of her poems, and the editor of Lancashire Life called her "the predatory sexual voice cruising in the fast lane of poetry". She sprang to national fame after reading poetry in a jacuzzi. She has been on radio and tv. You will be thrilled, chilled, brought to laughter and tears by this woman's perception and insight. If you are a prude or object to strong language, better pass this one by.

Downing tools in the allotment where they have toiled for the last six years, Valerie and her husband Wolfram decide to cycle to Germany to visit his mother. Before they leave, Val's guide the Aztec Priest appears among the bean rows and tells her this will be a Vision Quest - and so it turns out to be, not least due to their involvement in Channel 4's 'Real Holiday Show'. In spite of the dangers they encounter on this trip they develop an appetite for foreign parts and embark on many subsequent cycling adventures, all of which turn out more or less disastrously. Travel with them as they ride through France, Italy and their beloved Black Forest - the stoic Val shouting instructions from behind as the hapless blind Wolf does his best to avoid hitting anything. Share their horrors and delights at the larger-than-life characters they meet abroad and the comradeship of their Asian neighbours on the allotments. A heartwarming and spiritual tale of two lives inextricably intertwined - until Fate intervened.

It's 1979 and Val is ready for a new challenge. Answering an ad in The Caterer, she gets the job of Head Chef at Brownsea Castle in Poole Harbour. Once there she has to cope with a staff of six unruly lads, all but one pushing six foot. She bonds over a curry with her boss, a blustering, red-faced ex-colonial who thinks he runs the Castle while his level-headed wife strives to keep his feet on the ground and his nose to the grindstone. Read about Tony, the gangling teenager from Liverpool who makes blue cakes for tea, Briggs the recalcitrant Scotsman with his catchphrase 'If it's burrnt they cannae say it's not kewked' and the delectable Jimmy who poses in his football shorts outside her room on hot afternoons. Coming back for the return match in 1980 Val's heart is gladdened by the arrival of a team of divers. She finds a passionate lover in the boat's engineer, whom she dubs the Red-Bearded Dwarf. A laugh, a delight from start to finish, you will enjoy the escapism of this island where anything goes.

The author became an initiated Priestess of Wicca in 1984, and kept a dream diary until 1995. This is a record of the dreams which assisted her spiritual development. A happy hunting ground for psychologists, paranormal investigators and dream analysts. There is a second dream sequence running from 2007 to 2012 in which she lives a parallel life with her husband in Spirit, and also helps others with their dream development.

Madeleine de l’Aubespine (1546–1596), the toast of courtly and literary circles in sixteenth-century Paris, penned beautiful love poems to famous women of her day. The well-connected daughter and wife of prominent French secretaries of state, l’Aubespine was celebrated by her male peers for her erotic lyricism and scathingly original voice. Rather than adopt the conventional self-effacement that defined female poets of the time, l’Aubespine’s speakers are sexual, dominant, and defiant; and her subjects are women who are able to manipulate, rebuke, and even humiliate men. Unavailable in English until now and only recently identified from scattered and sometimes misattributed sources, l’Aubespine’s poems and literary works are presented here in Anna Klosowska’s vibrant translation. This collection, which features one of the first French lesbian sonnets as well as reproductions of l’Aubespine’s poetic translations of Ovid and Ariosto, will be heralded by students and scholars in literature, history, and women’s studies as an important addition to the Renaissance canon.

Includes information on author and playwright D.H. Lawrence such as a chronology of his life, a chronology of his writings, a checklist of his reading, calendar and maps of his travel, bibliography, filmography, and discography.

This critical study looks at the first four decades of Charles Tomlinson’s poetic career, and is the only published full-scale, exclusive treatment of his poetry. Tomlinson is a major British poet whose work has received more recognition in North America and continental Europe than it has in his own country, where still, in some quarters, its character is misunderstood and therefore misjudged. The purpose of Kirkham’s study is to increase understanding and appreciation of the exceptional achievement of Tomlinson’s poetry, emphasising both the startling originality of his vision – a unified vision of a natural-human world – and the subtlety of his poetic art. The study is a reading of the poems which aims to show what they yield to close scrutiny and to remove misconceptions. Known for its analytical rendering of sense-impressions and its avoidance of the personal pronoun, the objectivism of Tomlinson’s poetry is not an exercise in asceticism, but a means of enlarging the circumference of the perceiving self, an expansion of self which is not at the same time an inflation of the self-regarding ego. Its theme is not objects as such but relations, the relation of the perceiving self to the other, of the human to the non-human world. Its reputation for cool detachment is based on a misreading: it is a poetry of energy and excitement, which combines self-restraint with passionate conviction.