Here is Axholme by Mike Bradwell, to be published in June on what will be his posthumous birthday (he died in April last year). Bradwell founded Hull Truck theatre and for over a decade was director of the Bush Theatre, a few streets away from this desk, where there will be a party: balloons, cake, wine and hugs. Axholme portrays a childhood in a village in Lincolnshire in the 1950s in the voice of a nine-year-old kid. It’s rude and funny and not in the slightest bit sentimental. Laurie Lee, move over. Mike Leigh: ‘A wonderful, moving evocation of a vibrant community – funny, poignant, and above all, real.’
Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent was published by CBe in March, and is now also published in Australia, the US and Canada. Sarah Manguso: ‘Magnificent, simply one of the best books I’ve read in ages. I read it in a reverie of blissed-out, horrified amazement.’
It’s good that CBe doesn’t have shareholders, because the figures for the financial year just ended wouldn’t make them happy. The only people CBe is accountable to are readers. Thank you very much to those who pressed the ‘Donate’ link on the website home page: still there, and anyone who presses it gets a copy of a limited-edition 32-page full-colour booklet called Vedute a colori.
Early next year – which, if we get there, will be CBe’s 20th birthday – CBe will publish its largest and longest book to date. Testimony by the poet Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) happens to be – and I’m not entirely alone in thinking this – one of the major English-language works of the past century, and has never been published in the UK. It was originally published piecemeal between 1934 and 1978; in 2015 in the US Black Sparrow, now an imprint of David Godine, gathered the whole thing (including the original prose version, out of print for decades) into a single edition, and this is the edition – large format, 608 pages! – that CBe will publish in the UK.
The poems in Testimony are derived from court records from across the US between 1885 and 1915. Other poetry titles from CBe based on documentary records of the lives of others (interviews, photographs, emails …) are Sarah Hesketh’s 2016, Caroline Clark’s Sovetica, J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical and Long Cuts, and Dan O’Brien’s War Reporter and New Life, and Testimony may be the mother and father of them all.
Reznikoff is little known in the UK (the US too). But some people know him, and I’d be very happy if any of those who do get in touch. Publishing this book is a statement: about small presses (much of Reznikoff’s work was self-published and printed by himself), but it's also about why write, why publish. Any history of Modernism in literature that doesn't include this book needs kicking.
