Iron Press
North by North-East
Valerie is a contributor to Iron Press's 2006 anthology North by North-East, edited by Andy Croft and Cynthia Fuller. Her contribution was singled out for special praise by Nigel McLoughlin, writing in the Poetry Review:
North by North East covers forty-nine poets in 377 pages. If you want to know what's going on right now in the poetry scene in the North East, this is the book to buy. Like all good anthologies, it offers the reader a chance to discover poets they hadn't previously read. Among those who impressed me are Kevin Cadwallender and Valerie Laws. Cadwallender's poems speak from the inner city and the voice has a knowing humour which lifts the poems above their bleak surroundings. Laws's images are vivid and the language rattles and sparks. One gets the feelings she chooses her subjects carefully, seeking the intense and the pregnant within them and offering the reader something of the 'real' experience they contain. Of course the anthology also offers generous selections of work by Harrison, Stevenson, Allnutt, Herbert, O'Brien et al; as well as the excellent Brendan Cleary, S.J. Litherland and Katrina Porteous.
North by North East, published by Iron Press, price £10, available from Independent Northern Publishers, or by post from:
IRON Press,
5 Marden Terrace,
Cullercoats,
North Shields,
Northumberland,
NE30 4PD
ISBN-13: 978-0-906228-93-7
ISBN-10: 0-906228-93-X
Hadaway: the making of a writer
Hadaway was a play specially commissioned by Cloud Nine Theatre Group for the Tom Hadaway Festival, which took place throughout Tyneside in October 2003, a celebration of the North-East's most acclaimed living dramatist.
ISBN-13: 978-0-906228-91-3
ISBN-10: 0-906228-91-3
Read more about Hadaway and other plays by Valerie Laws.
Star Trek: the poems
Star Trek is part of our lives, our childhoods. We remember thrilling to the heroism and danger of space adventure; cutting our sexual teeth on fantasies about Uhura's legs, Data and Spock's entrancing unattainability, Picard's wonderful voice and shining head. The opening lines of each episode, the catchphrases, are hard-wired into our consciousness.
To boldly go, beam me up Scotty, the final frontier... part of our common shared culture in the same way that the myths of the Greeks and Romans were to our ancestors.
But how would the Star Trek crew cope with the miners' strike, an encounter with a writer-in-residence in outer space, or a simple request for the toilet? In 2000, Valerie Laws edited this collection, which holds the answer to these and many other questions. It includes her own contribution, Don't put your daughter into space, Mrs Kirk, subsequently included in her first full collection, Moonbathing, as well as poems from Linda France, Ian Duhig, Ian McMillan, Sheenagh Pugh and U.A. Fanthorpe.
Order Star Trek: the poems from Iron Press (price reduced from £5.99 to £4.49) by post from the address above.
ISBN-13: 978-0-906228-77-7
ISBN-10: 0-906228-77-8
For Crying Out Loud
This collection, published in 1994, brought together two Tyneside poets whose reputations were already growing. Valerie Laws was known as a prize winner in both the National and the Bloodaxe / Evening Chronicle poetry competitions, and her work was increasingly being seen in magazines; Kitty Fitzgerald was already well-known in the region as a writer for the stage, radio and screen. For Crying Out Loud assembles their fund of humorous, personal, sexual and political poems.
Order For Crying Out Loud from Iron Press (price reduced from £4.99 to £3.74), by post from the address above.
ISBN-13: 978-0-906228-49-4
ISBN-10: 0-906228-49-2