Although Michael Rosen is one of our best-loved and writers for children. his poems for grown-ups are less well known. Don’t Mention the Children is his first collection since Selected Poems (Penguin) in 2007.

Fans of his children’s books will enjoy the way these poems combine the silly and the sinister to catch the surrealism of everyday life, somewhere between Jacques Prévert, Ivor Cutler and Adrian Mitchell.

Few poets writing today can move so effortlessly between childishness and childlike seriousness.

Before the Second World War, there were around seventy cinemas operating in Leeds.  Since 2014, Valley Press poets James Nash and Matthew Hedley Stoppard have been visiting the sites of these abandoned picture-houses, and writing about them in verse.

Magical and memorable: poignant yet rich with humour, and underpinned, above all, by a great humanity. Sarah Waters on James Nash

“Witty and original.” Helen Mort on Matthew Hedley Stoppard

Things You Find in a Poet’s Beard is a collection of poems that have been shouted at children from schools to church halls. They are a curation of silly tales that have been illustrated and bound into a book.

Perhaps you’ll want to annoy your family by reading them out; perhaps you’ll want to chuckle at them under the covers with a torch; perhaps you’ll want to stare at the drawings drawn by Mr Chris Riddell or maybe you’ll want to shout them aloud to capture the spirit of A.F. Harrold himself.

From the archives...

This historic little book was published initially in 1992 and ran to six prints. it sold more than 10,000 copies making it the biggest selling book of English language haiku in the UK. it has been out of print for many years but is now published in a new format with every one of the 100 haiku intact. The Haiku 100 proved a watershed for IRON press, for the (then) recently formed British Haiku Society and for the haiku form itself in these islands.