The Littoral Press is a not-for-profit small poetry press. It also publishes Mervyn Linford's prose and poetry along with a small amount of prose works written by other authors. The press has so far published about fifty books altogether, thirty or more of those being poetry collections from various authors other than the founder of the press.

 

Please read these terms and conditions carefully. I have spent an inordinate amount of time in the past reading manuscripts only to be told after acceptance that the poet didn't realise that we worked on a cost-plus basis and that they would now prefer to submit elsewhere. If you read this 'about us' section in full you will then be able to understand the reasons behind the way the Littoral Press works. Thank You. 

 

 

 

We work on a cost-plus basis. This means that the author is charged the cost of printing plus a small amount for expenses and contingency. There are no contracts with the Littoral Press. The copyright remains 100% with the authors to do with as they wish. All our books have an ISBN number, therefore they are subject to Legal Deposit. This ensures that five copies of each poetry collection are housed in the archives of Oxford, Cambridge, Aberystwyth, Edinburgh and Belfast universities and one other copy is sent to the British Library. All published collections will also be featured on the Littoral Press website. At one time we worked hard at selling our books through the normal retail outlets but found that poetry collections could remain on the bookshelves for months, even years, or were lost or so well thumbed that they became unsaleable. From personal experience sales are more easily achievable through talks, readings, book fairs and the generosity of one's friends and relatives.  That is why we now leave the distribution of our poetry collections in the hands of our individual authors. We do have accounts with the major book distributors, such as: Gardiners and Coutts and as such can act as middle man for any poets wishing to deal with any retail outlets. The Littoral Press receives orders from bookshops through the ISBN people (Nielsen Book Data). We then send the order to the poet in question. After we receive payment from the buyer we then reimburse the poet by cheque. Our enquiries have found that all of our poets so far have more than covered their initial outlay and as we live in the digital world of POD (print on demand) - small print runs are the order of the day and additional copies can be ordered in small quantities at any time. We have found that our system works well and as we only publish a limited number of collections that we consider to be of the highest order the name of the press is now well established as a respected poetry publisher. Unsolicited poetry submissions are always welcome electronically to our address on the Contacts Page. Please send all Mss in a simple Microsoft Word Document or RFT. No fancy formatting please as that plays havoc with our system. Sadly there will be far more rejections than acceptances. This is par for the course I'm afraid - as I know from my own experience and a very thick collection of rejection slips! Nevertheless, if the work deserves to be in the public domain we will do our best to get it published.

 

The reason that Littoral Press works in the way it does on a cost-plus basis is mainly because it receives no funding whatsoever from any source other than the publisher's - i.e. my own pocket. Other small presses that do not receive a grant or any other outside financial assistance will usually ask if the poet would purchase a certain amount of copies of their collection at a discounted rate to help cover the cost of production. I decided against this approach. My cost-plus system is invariably cheaper per copy than the discounted copies purchased from most other small press publishers. 

 

 

 

For details of my poetry collection Credo published by  Mica Press

 

and my latest prose work The Incidental Marshman published by Campanula Books

 

please click on the Links button above

Credo, by Mervyn Linford. Mica Press. 62pp., £9

Mervyn Linford’s ninth collection of poems, Credo, is a bold statement of faith in the natural world.

     Linford’s main viewpoints are the shorelines, salt marshes, mudflats and tidal creeks of Essex. Anticipating the claim that these places are unprepossessing, he writes in ‘Indistinguishable (Marsh Road – Burnham on Crouch)’ ‘Who could love/such a landscape?’ For a celebrant of the natural world, love is a haunting, an imaginative involvement in the life of the land. That poem’s title, and the titles of several poems of place, give precise locations: ‘Wet & Westerly (Bradwell Waterside)’, ‘November the Fifth – Two Tree Island’, ‘Black-Tailed Godwits – Mersea Island’, and the promissory precision of the titles is fully realised in the keenly observed detail in the poems, details that includes variations in the quality of light in the landscape.

     In the opening lines of ‘November the Fifth – Two Tree Island’ he writes

          the sea – like silver foil –

          refracts the fallen sunlight from a tide

          that sears the mudflats.

The birds in ‘Black-Tailed Godwits – Mersea Island’ are seen ‘silhouetted in the heat of late September/and the sun-shot, glittering, shatter of the sea/in smithereens.’ In contrast to the luminescence of these two poems, he writes lyrically of a level light in ‘Esox Lucius’ (the Latin binomial for pike)

          How calm this river glides:

          the willow-herb, the willows, autumn light –

          where green as jade the water holds the sun

And he captures the absence of light in the playful virtuosity of ‘Soundless’: ‘Mist across the meadows/amputates alders:/leaves oaks in mid-air − /cuts cattle in half.’

     The natural world of Credo ranges from land and sea to the skies. ‘Through the Leaves – Through the Branches’ ends with the lines ‘I can see the planets and the stars/held after midnight, like the fruits of darkness’, and in ‘Spate – Liston Mill – River Stour’ he speaks of ‘a firmament so deep and drenched with stars’. Through this encompassing vision and a profound imaginative involvement in the life of the land, Linford is, in a pure and simple sense, a visionary and mystical poet. He himself is aware of this condition when he writes of sunlight on a mill pool in ‘Miracle’

          Who said that miracles don’t happen –

          that epiphanies and other forms of mystic revelation

          are dreams and wishes?

Miracles exist only when a person has the capacity for the miraculous, and it is this capacity that allows Linford to apprehend the spirit as well as the topography of a place.

     These lines from ‘Miracle’ are prompted, I believe, by a religious as well as a creative impulse. Linford’s religious impulse, a non-doctrinal twenty-first-century variant of animism, appears in the title poem, ‘Credo’, where he writes of ‘these religious littorals of light’; ‘Gothic – Thames Estuary’ ends in ‘the sanctity of stone/in dawn’s cathedral’; and he speaks of watching an ‘aspect of creation’ and realising ‘a joy/that’s unexplained’ in ‘Black-Headed Gulls – Sudbury’. His explicitly religious poems, ‘Il Est Né’ and ‘Epiphany at Chartres’, lack a Christian presence and seem merely dutiful.

     His love poems, too, lack a presence: the loved one is less substantial than the contexts in which she appears; her presence is displaced by features of the natural world; she is not seen as a subject of adoration. In ‘Golden Shower’ he speaks of ‘each cruel event’ and sees the loved one not in her own right but ‘in every flower/in every star’; ‘Song & Dance’ speaks of the end of love, and perhaps the end of life

          where darkness snuffs

          the snowdrop and the rose

          and rooks are silent.  

And yet, perhaps ironically, ‘Old Man’s Fancy’, a poem in which the loved one appears, or disappears, among bluebells, anemones, bees and nettles, is one of Linford’s most lyrical. His lyricism is apparent throughout the book; Credo sings.

 

 

James Aitchison, October 2017

 

 

 

The Incidental Marshman by Mervyn Linford

Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater

 

The full title of author, poet and pantheist Mervyn Linford’s latest book is ‘The Incidental Marshman: From Mucking Creek to the Broomway’. A marshman is the name given to a person who lives in marshy country, an inhabitant of a specific area of marshland. It’s a term I had not come across before but Linford, having moved from the bombsites of Canning Town in the East End of London over sixty-seven years ago to the freshwater fleets, dykes and creeks in the Essex coastlands, more than fits this definition.

At the start of this book, which is part poetry and part prose, Linford pitches his readers into a distinctive landscape that is marked (some might say marred) by oil refineries, pipelines, flare-stacks, standpipes and landfill sites. Some might regard this as an unlikely place for poetry, especially poetry that relates to the natural world,  but Linford is perfectly at home here drawing endless inspiration from creeks, guts, gulleys, saltings and marshes in the coastal environs of Essex: strange worlds that are neither land nor sea. Despite what Linford terms as ‘our eleventh-hour inability to face the environmental and climate facts’, there are success stories to be found within these pages. The Thames, for one thing, is far less polluted than it used to be.

Linford’s powers of description make this a memorable read: a single daffodil is described as ‘a bright idea’ and Spring is ‘a green idea.’ The sun is ‘a burning question in the west’. A little egret is ‘a circus performer on stilts’ as it teeters on the edge of the tide and brent geese ‘bob about on the waves like burnt corks’. Reading this book, you can almost smell the oyster smacks, cockle spits and brine coming off the sea.

Never one for towns, Linford is happiest when he is communing with nature: ‘the curlew’s lost and lonely call speaks to the soul whereas the sound of traffic and aircraft doesn’t. Somehow it’s where we came from.’

The book is a fund of information. Linford’s knowledge of his local area is encyclopaedic.  If you want to know where the Peasants’ Revolt began, why a pub called ‘The Dun Cow’ on Canvey Island changed its name to ‘The King Canute’ or the name of the plant that used to be seen on the back of the old thruppenny bit, the answers are all here.

Key events are described such as The Great North Sea Flood, interesting insights are given on the possible origins of Dutch Elm Disease and an account is given of the life cycle of the European eel. Always one to document the vicissitudes of our English weather, the Great Storm of October 1987 is given some prominence in a chapter on Southend-on-Sea when ‘Michael Fish went ex-directory’.

We catch the author’s surprise and delight in coming across masses of the relatively rare golden samphire below a seawall in Hole Haven, sense his wonder at seeing a phosphorescent bloom of plankton out in the estuary, marvel at his description of sand martins massing for migration at Paglesham and share the joy of patience rewarded when he finally comes face to face with a short-eared owl quartering the banks of Two Tree Island.

Linford’s love of fishing is all pervasive. Many fish swim through the pages of this book: eel, rudd, roach, perch, tench, flounder and skate are all there in phenomenal numbers just waiting to take the bait on the end of our line. He writes extensively about the shellfish trade at Old Leigh and the oyster fisheries at Paglesham.

I never knew that Essex had so many interesting place-names. As well as Mucking there is Messing followed by places with names such as Fobbing, Sutton-with-Shopland and Ballards Gore. In many cases, Linford gives us their derivations and sometimes he writes poems which play on these names.

The book ends at the Broomway: a public right of way across the foreshore at Maplin Sands. When the tide is out it provides access to Foulness Island. The Broomway is named after the ‘withies’ or  ‘brooms’, bundles of twigs attached to short poles, that were used to mark the route. The track is extremely dangerous in misty weather as incoming tides can flood across the sands at high speed obscuring the direction of the shoreline.

This book is complemented with many colour photographs taken by the author to illustrate the local geography. With his wealth of knowledge and at times, irrepressible sense of humour, Linford leads us on an inspiring journey that is accessible, informative and enjoyable. Fully recommended.

 

The Incidental Marshman

By Mervyn Linford

Released – 1 June 2022

Campanula Books

ISBN: 978-1-8698482923

 

First Published in The Poet

 

 

 

 

https://www.thepoetmagazine.org/the-incidental-marshman