Pomona’s Orchard – Publishing in April 2026

Description

Pomona’s Orchard, Adrian Blamires’ third collection, is dedicated to the arts of peace. Its tutelary spirits include Caliban tending to the dying Prospero, a great-aunt rescuing cats and dogs in the Blitz, the enlightened schoolmaster to an orphaned John Keats, and Pomona, Roman goddess of fruitful propagation, as the genius loci of a Herefordshire orchard. Miracles of love and healing are conjured in the face of violence and rapacity. Lament and dissent are sounded, alongside poems of witty, sensual profusion.

The collection closes with a Tudor-themed sequence which presents pressing encounters – highly politicized, highly eroticized – between the Virgin Queen and her subjects. Drawing on Elizabethan lyric, symbolism, realia and innuendo, the poet offers a tragicomic vision of queen and country, a resonant blend of history and myth.

Adrian Blamires. Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, 92 pages, April 2026.

Praise for Adrian Blamires:

‘Blamires is specifically electric in the act of observation – he can manage internal and external observation with a precision that is as surprising as it is revealing and unsettling… He also serves out intricate patterns and motifs that work across the length and breadth of each collection… he shapes an entire poem as a ‘singing mesh’ yet also creates a massive yet delicate architecture out of the book itself – the book as a poetic form in fact. I very much recommend the poetry of Adrian Blamires.’ – David Morley

‘Poems of acute contemporary relevance, in a language at once lyrical and demotic.’ – Elizabeth Garrett

‘Both bawdy and ceremonious. What more could one want?’ – Ian House on Eliza’s Entertainments

Adrian Blamires was born in Porthleven, Cornwall in 1964. He spent his first ten years living in various towns in the south and southwest of England before a move north to Lancashire. He now lives in Reading with his wife and son. His main career has been as an English teacher in sixth form colleges. In 2017 he completed a PhD in Renaissance drama at the University of Reading. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Effect of Coastal Processes (2005) and The Pang Valley (2010), both from Two Rivers Press. Eliza’s Entertainments, a pamphlet produced in collaboration with the artist Robert Fitzmaurice, was published in 2015.