Smith Doorstop imprint: 24 books

Part selfportrait, part love affair, the poems in SelfPortrait with The Happiness are obsessed with moments elsewhere. Rural England contends with immense Chinese cities via Thailand and Japan. The effect is a collection which craves the exotic in the everyday: puppeteers communicating through their...

Jonathan Davidson has a loving, observant and wry regard for the frailties of the human condition. He makes fresh something we thought we knew; writing of the everyday the way Vermeer might be said to paint it.’ — Maura Dooley

"Allison McVety’s follow up to 2007’s The Night Trotsky Came to Stay is a paean to the everyday." Poetry Book Society

Michael McCarthy grew up on a farm in West Cork, Ireland. His first poetry collection Birds’ Nests and Other Poems won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. His children’s books have been translated into seventeen languages. He works as a priest in North Yorkshire.

I like the way good food and diction go together so clearly. Geographically [these poems] excel, and in so many other directions too. The poems are different to what one normally gets in English, the issues far bigger, as in "Dhimmi Under Sharia Law" (A Lawyer's Poem) and in many others...

Shortlisted for the 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. This first full collection sees Paula Cunningham reflecting on her upbringing in Northern Ireland, while casting a clear eye on family history and friendships. Its memorable short sequences include ‘Fathom’, which centres on her...

Stanley Cook (19221991) was much admired in his lifetime but never achieved the popular audience and critical reputation his work deserved. Cook went his own way, sanguine about the fashions of the poetry establishment, and quietly writing some of the most readable, intelligent and vividly achieved poems of our time.

The poems in Andrew Forster’s third collection continue his explorations of what it means to make a home: from Cumbria, where he now lives, to South Yorkshire where he grew up, this book is firmly rooted in the north of England. He works as Literature Officer for the Wordsworth Trust and the ghost...

If you know there was more to the seventies than boogie nights and flares but can't quite remember what, then this is the book to fill in the gaps. Jim Pollard's first novel reads like a thriller, it has pace, bite and great humour. It turns the music industry, punk rock and growing up in the 70s...

Steve Dearden's stories are populated by real people with real jobs and real desires and fears; and in the rhythms of the dialogue and the scaffolding of the terse descriptions, we find loneliness, and majesty, and a belief in humanity that gives your heart a lift.