Welcome...

Welcome to the 'hatchings' blog @ egg box publishing, a poetry publisher based in Norwich, Norfolk, run by the poet Nathan Hamilton. This is where we talk about and sell egg box books, but there'll eventually be a few other things to do. In the meantime, have a browse and get acquainted, sign up to leave any comments and get added to our contacts database, buy some books (we honestly wouldn't be upset) and subscribe to our RSS feed. Don't forget to add your email to our mailing list to receive very occasional updates, information and offers.

In Waffles, Matthew Welton presses words on a honeycomb iron and serves them crisp with syrup. Readers of his widely admired Carcanet collections, The Book of Matthew and We needed coffee but..., will recognise one of Britain's most original poets seriously extending his range. Vividly working with light and shade, the intricate patternings of this remarkable sequence repeatedly ask us to imagine what's real: 'A real voice on the phone requests a sum of cash. / Real peaches fill my paper sack. A real drawer slams'.

"A galloping iambic beat, like an over-caffeinated pulse, is maintained throughout Matthew Welton's pamphlet. The poems form interconnecting grids of repetition and parallelism, and cadences ricochet as in an echo chamber: "A yellow swallow hollers in / a hollow yellow willow tree" becomes "A yellow yaffle snaffles up / a pile of apple waffles". Constructivist poems can be as joyless as equations, but Waffles is too playful and too curious about the world for that: "I think that what I'm saying with the words I use / is stuff which, by the sound of things, I might not mean." Welton's highly original approach to form has again produced a set of musical, maddening, irresistible poems."
-- Paul Batchelor, The Guardian

"Welton is the single most enjoyable, exciting poet working in and 
with English today."
-- Simon Turner 

"Poems are rarely so curious, precise and committed to their enquiry"
-- Jack Underwood

Waffles by Matthew Welton is the first of Egg Box's new pamphlet series, F.U.N.E.X., featuring new work from the UK's most exciting and talented poets.

Launch event details to follow soon.

Two amazing new releases from Egg Box Publishing this Christmas: prize-winning rising poetry star, Agnes Lehoczky's long-anticipated second collection, Rememberer, and critically-acclaimed Vahni Capildeo's sensational third collection, Dark & Unaccustomed Words, both in wonderfully produced limited edition hardback.


"Vahni Capildeo not only breaks down conventional notions of seeing the world, but re-affirms ideas of the value and worth of individual experiences. This work... underlines what matters above all: the fate of the free self. It is a subversive ocean of diamonds, rubies and bones, raging against limiting forces.”
-- Andre Bagoo, for Newsday (Trinidad and Tobago)


"What I enjoy about Ágnes Lehóczky’s prose poetry is its dialogic lyricism. Her syntax carries the work of caesura and enjambment, shaping rhythmic wholes that take you back to places we’ve never been. The best of poetry does the like, and this is it."
-- Peter Robinson

The University of East Anglia is proud to announce two new anthologies of work from their world-renowned creative writing MA.

You are lime cordially invited to celebrate with us as follows:

Here are the details of the NORWICH launch:
Tuesday 4th October
UEA Drama Studio, Norwich
7.00pm, readings and refreshments

Here are the details of the LONDON launch: 
Tuesday 11th October
The Old Crown, 33 New Oxford St. WC1
6.30pm, readings and cash bar

Copies of books will be available on special offer. If you sadly can't make it, then advance copies of both the Poetry & Prose volumes are now available from us here online. General release date (to Amazon and general trade) is OCT 31st.

Enjoy tomorrow's best writing today.

‘In years to come, when some of these writers are household names, this book will allow you to say, with total superiority: “I preferred their early stuff.”’ -- Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine

We are clucking over the fact that Egg Box Poet, Vahni Capildeo, has been shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Literature, Caribbean Award, among some well-plumaged talent. That makes it two-out-of-two for us this year, with both of the last two Egg Box poets nominated or winning prizes, after Agnes Lehoczky scooped the Jane Martin Prize in May.

And, don't forget, Vahni was already highly commended in The Forward Prize, 2009. There is a little more information about this latest prize triumph here.

Vahni's next book, Dark & Unaccustomed Words is the most lyrical and playful part of a three-part project exploring the boundaries of the human and the natural, and the oceanic or musical possibilities of poetic form, and will be out later this year. It is available to pre-order here. If you haven't already, be sure to properly acquaint yourself with Vahni's brilliant work immediately here.

Egg Box poet Agnes Lehoczky has won the inaugural Jane Martin Prize for Poetry at Girton College, Cambridge. The judging panel, led by Dr Ian Patterson, critic, poet, author and Director of Studies in English at Queen’s College Cambridge, decided to award the new national poetry prize of £1000 jointly to poets Agnes and Emily Critchley (another good poet, not published by us - they do exist, but aren't to be trusted). Both were judged on a body of work, and Agnes' winning poem was Carp Fishpond Fable, which will feature in her second collection, out later this year. If you don't already own a copy of the first, you know what to do.

Commenting on the entries, Dr Patterson said: "Out of a large and very varied entry, the judges finally succeeded in agreeing on an impressive shortlist. In the end, though, two entries stood out, for their ambition and for the sustained level of their achievement: Emily Critchley's intellectual and poetic virtuosity and vitality, and the haunting, disturbing and beautiful interior worlds of Agnes Lehoczky's prose poems. Although very different, it proved impossible to choose one over the other, and so the prize is shared between them."

We'd like to draw your attention to a few excellent, and deservingly highly favourable, reviews of Vahni Capildeo's Undraining Sea. Edward Baugh in the Caribbean Review of Books says: "This poetry is not for the faint-hearted. It disturbs conventional notions of how poems make meaning, both for the reader and for other poets for whom Vahni Capildeo — a Trinidadian writer living in Britain — may be the poet’s poet ... [Her poems] are at one and the same time tantalising enticement and warning." And quite right, too.

Adam Piette says, at Black Box Manifold: "This is an urgent, shapely, generous and serious collection – of self-witness, astute, gentle, sharp and alive, sensing where the mind in words will go, along long journeys/sequences of encounter with the lost other in language." Indeed, that's what we thought.

And finally, Andrew Bailey has also sung high hymns of praise unto the poetry of Capildeo, at Todd Swift's Eyewear. He says, "what she is responsible for, what I'm grateful for, is a wholly recommendable collection that justifies the praise on its back." He also says: "If the work is shapely, incidentally, so is the hardback form Eggbox have provided for it." And so say all of us. You should probably buy one or something.