Hello and welcome!
époque press is an independent publisher based between Brighton and Dublin established to promote and represent the very best in new literary talent.
Through a combination of our main publishing imprint and our online ezine we aim to bring inspirational and thought provoking work to a wider audience.
Our main imprint is seeking out new voices, authors who are producing high-quality literary fiction and who are looking for a partner to help realise their ambitions. Our commitment is to fully consider all submissions on literary merit alone and to provide a personal response.
Our ezine will showcase a combination of the written word, visual and aural art forms, bringing together artists working in different mediums to encourage and inspire new perspectives on specific themes.
For details of how to submit your work to us for consideration please follow the submissions guidelines and for all other enquiries please email info@epoquepress.com
Hello and welcome!
époque press is an independent publisher based between Brighton and Dublin established to promote and represent the very best in new literary talent.
Through a combination of our main publishing imprint and our online ezine we aim to bring inspirational and thought provoking work to a wider audience.
Our main imprint is seeking out new voices, authors who are producing high-quality literary fiction and who are looking for a partner to help realise their ambitions. Our commitment is to fully consider all submissions on literary merit alone and to provide a personal response.
Our ezine will showcase a combination of the written word, visual and aural art forms, bringing together artists working in different mediums to encourage and inspire new perspectives on specific themes.
For details of how to submit your work to us for consideration please follow the submissions guidelines and for all other enquiries please email info@epoquepress.com
époque press
pronounced: /epƏk/
definition: /time/era/period
époque press
pronounced: /epƏk/
definition: /time/era/period
époque press ezine
Ian C Smith
Decryption
I crossed the border of my overcrowded birth country
alive with anticipation after decades of absence.
Rooftops, dark vaults, slid past the train window.
this rainswept return caused my breath to riot,
memories tremors in phantom limbs
during years I felt were a waste, a regret.
Travelling back to my grim childhood district
forsaken for emigration to an arid land,
the misery of the past’s crooked ways,
signalled the irony of fait accompli rather than fairytale.
Belongings sold, cost of passage all I could pay,
this midlife crisis nagging in my half-breed’s belly,
I guarded my kitbag, frugal, alert, excited,
in a low-ceilinged pub, nursing ale, accent noticed.
Each life is a mystery, death the only certainty
in the refuge of small towns’ cautious clusters.
He reads in safety by a window, thoughts flickering
to a time he struck out on a personal odyssey
before his spirit of adventure withered, jaded.
He bookmarks the page, looks out as if across a chasm,
not at his neighbour mowing, but blackened hovels
seen through rain, survivors of war, of loss.
A tremor of memory calls up sweat forgotten,
intimacy left behind in a dark, sorrowful landscape.
He trawls for clues to his lone wolf life now,
those ectopic days, their profound effect pivotal,
this man with ink stains on his fingers who reads,
looks back, puzzled, scratching imaginary itches.
Funeral Cues
An anthology of speakers descanting,
easing our ache anecdotally with her full life,
I am safe from choking up until the end
when a close friend of our larrikin leave-taker
gets mugged, her throat, then mine, grabbed mid-sentence.
Many might rehearse their mortal futures,
death skulking, stalking us corralled here.
The slideshow. The way we were. Rites of fervid lives
from sagas to sonnets, selves slowly running down,
holes burned clear through as if meteor-shot.
She and a sunflower smile in Alaska,
its face ever seeking the sun before darkness falls.
Then she holidays where I stayed only weeks ago,
her hand flexed on the same ladder I climbed
where the sea wind shall not blow away her hat again.
Pictures summing a life lived seem to last no longer
than the Bede’s sparrow’s brief flight through that hall.
A perspective of graves, huddles of sere leaves, trees bereft,
I fail to recognise someone, fluster, but with grace
she understands, prompts my smile, says, wistfully ironic,
Everybody is so grey. We are all grey.
I scan faces for advance recognition, spot two,
a jolt, one’s pretty face now past youth, careworn,
the other, widowed, not old yet her hair turned white.
I sit out days at scarred benches, ossifying,
wasting time, pages dwindling towards denouement.
A wild thing kicks inside me to start again,
smell a golden pagoda, enter an igloo, stroll Trieste.
Charge into life. Do it. Do it now.
Precious, precious
What would you sacrifice
to discover your top shelf writers again,
narratives of lives, meaning through pain?
What would you sacrifice
to explore a foreign land, follow youth’s track,
tomorrow crammed into one rucksack?
What would you sacrifice
for the lucky shock of first love’s thrilling crush,
hair quite silly, adoration’s rush?
What would you sacrifice
for arrival in that half-imagined place
knowing you have found the perfect base?
Oh, what would you sacrifice
for the embrace of cherished darlings now gone,
hear their dear voices, hold on, hold on?
Purblind
Showering, I can’t see past my gut grown stealthily
over a blur of years as I hurry onward.
Shrugging into an old T-shirt I marvel
how long I have been unthinkingly wearing it,
clothes low on my wish list, ditto their messages.
Sixteen years, I work out admiring its endurance
tracking over places the relic has been on show,
activities this stout cloth has supported,
colours faded to pastel, a well-travelled,
stretched, scoured, weather-beaten veteran,
a gift from visiting French-Canadian friends.
After tossing it hundreds of times in the wash
I peer in the mirror at the forgotten cartoon.
A chubby little guy runs uphill on the hard part,
a winding road behind him, scenes of life on Earth.
His heart bursts from his chest, sweat flying.
‘I have guts’, the caption’s translation reads.
Ian C Smith's work has appeared in, Antipodes Australian Poetry Journal, Critical Survey, Live Encounters, Prole, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two-Thirds North. His seventh book is 'wonder, sadness, madness joy', Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.