Viva Brighton Issue #62 April 2018

Robert Hamburger at Pighog, Grand Central. Photos by Andrew King
POETRY
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Brighton in verse
‘The poetry capital of the South’
As I sat down to write this, a package
dropped through my letterbox. This was
Rattle, an American poetry magazine. With
all the folly of incipient old age, I’ve entered
their 2018 Chapbook Competition, and my
entry fee gets me a one-year subscription.
On the contents page there’s a name that
leaps out at me: Maria Jastrzębska.
Maria and I both went to Škocjan in Slovenia
about ten years ago to translate poems.
Poetry! Where else could a Californian
magazine find a reader in Brighton who
went to Slovenia with a poet from Poland?
Of course, there’s nothing insular about our
local poets, who gaze out to sea as much
as they do towards the Downs. This is reflected
in the city’s two local poetry presses,
Pighog and Waterloo. Both started more or
less with the century, and both have strong
internationalist identities.
Pighog was founded by John Davies, who
started out publishing pamphlets. Tim
Beech’s A Solitary Pine Tree in Sussex is
perhaps my favourite, Lincoln Green cover
and endpapers, poems written when Tim
was a shepherd on Lullington Heath, a
real collector’s item. As well as pamphlets
and anthologies, Pighog branched out
into novels by Ciaran O’Driscoll and Paul
Hoggart. Pighog’s cosmopolitanism – the
press has published British, Irish, Slovenian,
and Polish poets – attracted the attention of
Red Hen in Los Angeles and Pighog is now
an imprint of the LA publisher.
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