Books

Poetry

The Cosmographs  •  Paziols: Living in the Land of the Cathars  •  Blizzard  • A Life Spanning a Century  •    The Portrait Gallery  •  A Mouthful of Stars  •  Papering Over the Cracks  •  Other People  •  Breach: the Art of Commons  •  Day Return  •  Fiesta  •  Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer  •  On the Edge  •  First Cut 

Non-Fiction

Paziols: Living in the Land of the Cathars  •  In Search of the Celts  • Flute  • A Life Spanning a Century  •  Arthur Symons, Leading Poet of the English Decadence  •  Joy, Light, Sorrow and Splendour  •  The Loving Scapegoat  •  Breach: the Art of Commons  •  Via Contemplativa, Via Activa  •  Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer  •  The Slippery are Very Crafty 

Fiction

A Box of Chocolates: 50 Short Stories  •  Another Mouth Has Passed  •  Opening Gambit  •  Internal Memorandum  •  Diggers and Dreamers  •  The Foundling and Other Stories

Drama

The Chosen One  •  The Traitor  •  The Brotherhood of Thieves

The Cosmographs

by Stephen Owen

The Cosmographs deal, in part, with the dominant Archetype of Christianity. How does the West move forward? The West is arrogant and consumerist. Nature is seen as an exploitable machine. This is wrong. Lyrical Nature goes unperceived by 90% of Western urbanized humankind… Read more

Paziols: Living in the Land of the Cathars

by Pam Kelly and Keiron Pearce

We are in Languedoc, land of the Cathars and the troubadours. A place of courtly love, dark deeds and ancient secret mysteries. A place where lived a peaceful and tolerant, simple-living people who were tortured and burnt at the stake for their belief that the material world was an evil sham and that the spiritual world was the true reality… Read more

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In Search of the Celts

by John H Pollard

One of the great mysteries of the last 2,500 years is: where did the people known as the Celts originate? In this book John Pollard adds his intuition and many hours of patient research to archaeological evidence to assemble a plausible answer… Read more

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A Box of Chocolates: 50 Short Stories

by Various Authors. Foreword by Fay Weldon.

The fifty stories in this book were all entries in Shaftesbury Arts Centre’s first short story competition, held in the autumn of 2008. The competition was meant for adults, and most of the thirty-six adult entries are in this book, but sixteen children also entered, the youngest just six years old. Their stories are also here… Read more

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Flying into the Blizzard

by RJ Hansford

This collection is concerned with the poet as ‘maker’, and explores craftsmanship, nationality, and the spiritual experience… Read more

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Another Mouth Has Passed

by JC Sledge

There is a proposal to build a social housing development in the attractive village of Horton Fence. This is not going down too well with some members of the community, notably the more elderly and affluent ones.

As the project progresses, it gives rise to all manner of events and memories. Some of them are rather less than welcome… Read more

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Flute

by Richard Adeney

A candid and entertaining account of his life and achievements by one of the country’s most distinguished orchestral musicians. Flute gives an honest portrayal of the ups and downs of a professional musician’s life, and is full of anecdotes about many of the “big names” in 20th century music… Read more

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Opening Gambit

by Clive Russell

An oilcloth package, discovered at a boot-fair, leads the Narrator into a story of a churchmouse who stows away in the portmanteau of Cardinal Campeggio. He was the absentee Bishop of Salisbury, a fast talker but slow doer, who the Pope had selected to act as Papal Legate at the divorce hearing of… Read more

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A Life Spanning a Century

by Dorothy Mules née Tabb

Reminiscences, short poems and occasional pieces from a well liked Shaftesbury woman whose life covered almost the whole of the twentieth century… Read more

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The Portrait Gallery

by Sebastian Hayes

A striking array of male and female personages, some historical, some fictitious, bare their souls in a taut series of dramatic monologues… Read more

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A Mouthful of Stars

by Sylvia Oldroyd

A collection of 58 poems taking a lyrical look at a variety of life’s facets: including language and music, New Forest places and wildlife, family relationships, travels in Europe and world events; beginning with the elements and ending with time and the universe… Read more

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Papering Over the Cracks

by Pam Kelly

A wry and sometimes painful look at how we complete the jigsaw of our lives and gradually put all the broken pieces back together… Read more

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Arthur Symons, Leading Poet of the English Decadence

by Sebastian Hayes

During the Eighteen Eighties Arthur Symons, the ‘English Verlaine’, dominated the literary scene but has since then disappeared without a trace. Sebastian Hayes argues that he deserves to be remembered for his musical, precise and deeply felt poems and as a precursor of the Imagist movement.  Read more

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Joy, Light, Sorrow and Splendour

by Chris Irven

The Benedictine monk introducing this book describes it as ‘the most profound and searching series of meditations on the rosary that I know.’ Lightly combining theological insight with a human touch it engages heart and mind page after page. Far from constraining the reader to follow a rigid form of words it positively encourages the imagination to explore unhurried the events in the life of Jesus, drawing one into the story like a novel. The 200 separate thoughts are gathered into 20 packets called mysteries, each beautifully illustrated in colour, providing a meditation that can last from 15 minutes to an hour depending on mood and time available… Read more

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The Loving Scapegoat

by Chris Irven

In its use of English and its coloured illustrations this book offers a Stations of the Cross in a direct and down-to-earth style. Following the journey of Jesus from Pilate’s Pavement to the Place of the Skull it explores the thoughts and feelings of the man who was also the Son of God. But we the reader find ourselves in the shoes of those he met on his way – from Pilate who sentenced him, to the escort commander, to Simon the stranger, the compassionate women, the brigand dying beside him, the Centurion – each brought into sharp self-awareness by briefly encountering this extraordinary condemned man. Not a book for those unwilling to be challenged, The Loving Scapegoat snaps sound theology into its rightful place in today’s world.… Read more

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Other People

by Pam Kelly

“Other People” is about innocence and experience and how our lives are shaped and changed by the people that we meet. It starts with the author’s childhood as a war baby and ends with the question we all ask ourselves — what if it had all been different? Read more

Buy now  •  Pam Kelly’s biography

Breach: the Art of Commons

By Catherine Simmonds, Rachel Sargent, Justin Orwin and Keith Walton

The Art of Commons is the response of four artists - a poet, a painter, a photographer and a prose writer - to a Dorset Common (Breach Common, Shaftesbury) over a six month period from the shortest day of the year to the longest.  Read more

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Via Contemplativa, Via Activa

by Sebastian Hayes

“What is this life if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.”

Present Western society has become all bustle, noise, travel and competitiveness. Is this a good thing?  Read more

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Day Return

by MC Wood

With 44 poems, 'Day Return' covers the range of human experience, from birth to death, from humour to sadness… Read more

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Fiesta

by Pam Kelly

By the author of On the Edge. Poems of varied mood and content written in Andalucia in April and May 2007… Read more

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Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer,
A new translation complete with notes and an essay Rimbaud Revisited 1968—2006

by Sebastian Hayes

This is a very readable new translation of the famous French writer’s most important work complete with extensive much needed Notes and a long essay on Rimbaud, interpreted in the light of twentieth century social and political movements… Read more

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On the Edge

by Pam Kelly

20 poems about how one woman sees life, love, sex and death in the 21st century, On the Edge takes reverent and irreverent looks at the way postmodern Britain shapes our lives. Personal, tragic, witty and thoughtful, the poems cover… Read more

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Internal Memorandum

by JC Sledge

There are hopes, achievements and frustrations at work, just as there are in our personal lives. What goes on in one aspect of our lives is bound to have an influence on what happens in the other.

As Martin Brown finds out… Read more

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The Slippery are Very Crafty

by David Grierson

At a time when China is rarely out of the western media, we have here an opportune and personal perspective on life in the mighty People’s Republic – a country that never fails to fascinate, bewilder, beguile and, from time to time, frighten as well… Read more

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Diggers and Dreamers

by Keith Walton

Rural Languedoc. The South of France. Summer 1976.

‘There is another world, but it is in this one’— and the characters in this novel, in their different ways, mean to find it… Read more

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First Cut

by Keith Walton

The 39 poems, a selection from the work of several years, range widely, from the precisely-observed descriptive to the philosophical, from the lyrical to the (subtly) polemical, from moments captured to stories told… Read more

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The Chosen One

by Sebastian Hayes

A group of middle class intellectuals accompanied by a mysterious South American visitor have just ended an informal dinner party and to pass the time start a session of Ouija. The men present sabotage the attempt though one or two garbled messages start coming through. Then everything starts to go wrong… Read more

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The Foundling and Other Stories

by Sebastian Hayes

Thirteen remarkable tales in which you encounter a girl with gull’s feet, a talking pheasant, a cave of nothing, a universe in creation, a prince imprisoned in a garden of earthly delights… They recall at once traditional folk tales, Calvino’s clever reworkings, biblical and Gnostic parables, creation myths… Each story is thought-provoking and hugely entertaining.

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The Traitor

by Arnold Hinchliffe

Is it better to fight against an oppressive regime, or to collaborate with it in order to gain a position from which one can do a little good? This is the dilemma explored in Arnold Hinchliffe’s last play… Read more

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The Brotherhood of Thieves

by Arnold Hinchliffe

London 1776 “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains” (J-J Rousseau). In America the colonists have just raised the flag of revolt while in France the tottering ancien régime is nearing its end. In London, magnificent and miserable London, a formidably well-organised band of thieves led by Ne’er Hang Jack, terrorise the wealthy, combining violence with deep revolutionary convictions… Read more

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