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Both of the two most recent New Walk pamphlets, by Sean O'Brien and Mark Ford:
MARK FORD, THE MORLOCKS: A FANTASIA
ISBN 978-1-9193077-0-1
NWE 30.2
In this hilarious, haunting venture into social criticism, Mark Ford reconfigures H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) to capture the violence of contemporary social media and the vertiginous political anxieties of our moment. Wells’s predatory Morlocks are here transformed into online trolls ruthlessly hunting down their victims, the child-like, enfeebled Eloi. The sequence charts an updated Time Traveller’s bewilderment at the unleashing of the id made possible by X and other platforms, while also tracing the Eloi’s ‘SAD SAD’ attempts to resist the trumpets and muskets of their enemies. Presiding over the mayhem is the hubristic Père Morlock, a descendant of Alfred Jarry’s Père Ubu, and a character to rival Jarry’s obscene autocrat.
Fusing Brechtian satire and Audenesque fantasy, Ford’s unsettling narrative lays bare the antagonisms and delusions that fissure modern consciousness, creating a dystopian parable not of the future, but of now.
Mark Ford was born in 1962. His publications include four collections of poetry (Landlocked, Soft Sift, Six Children, and Enter, Fleeing), three monographs, and four volumes of reviews and essays. This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.
'Undoubtedly his sharpest and most sinister work to date.' - Anthony Caleshu
‘Mark Ford’s brilliant, bizarre new poem is at once a bitingly astringent satire – reminiscent of Miroslav Holub or Tomaž Šalamun – and his most melodious and unfettered work yet.' - Oli Hazzard
SEAN O'BRIEN, À LA CARTE
ISBN 978-1-7392812-9-8
NWE 30.1
Like carnivals of fire stoked by jaunty imps,
two trains for which no stop is scheduled meet
head on, and war begins, which leaves the clock
its present task, to decorate catastrophe
with ignorance. Or so the story runs, the one
you’re reading just this minute, when you’ll look up
from the page and hear the sirens screaming.
These poems are often concerned with England remembered, imagined and, latterly, undone. O’Brien’s imagination is shaped by a war that took place before he was born – hence the phantasmal quality of some of what happens. Memory can seem at once tyrannical and without visible means of support, but time and history insist on their due, sometimes in fantastical form, and there are reckonings to be made too with love and friendship.
Sean O’Brien’s twelfth collection of poems, The Bonfire Party, is to be published by Picador in 2026. Recent poetry publications include Embark (2022), Impasse: for Jules Maigret (2023), Otherwise (2023) and Juniper (2024). His collection of short stories The Long Glass appeared in spring 2025. He has translated Dante’s Inferno, Aristophanes’ The Birds, Lope de Vega’s The Sicilian Courtesan, Eye of the Island: Selected Poems of Corsino Fortes (with Daniel Hahn) and the Complete Poems of Abai Kunanbayuli. His poetry has received the Somerset Maugham, Cholmondeley and E.M. Forster awards, and the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. O’Brien is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
'The poems in A La Carte may wear a collective black tie, but they also strike a note of lyric defiance. The compelling music of their lines and their imaginative command offer a love letter – at once plangent and exhilarating – to the past and to ‘"England, England, with all of its failings".' - Katharine Towers
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