A small press and poetry subscription service dedicated to the art of the introduction
Selected and introduced by Alex Wong
Headless Poet Introduction 1.2
Thomas Hood (1799-1845) was one of the most popular British poets of his time, but also among the finest and the most idiosyncratic. Remembered chiefly for his outrageous punning and for his poems of social conscience, he was a master of both comical verse and Keatsian Romanticism, as well as much in between.
In this new selection, Alex Wong teases out Hood's singular achievement, drawing our attention to the poet’s most ambitious work — serious in its artistic ambitions, whatever the tone — in order to reveal a distinct sensibility in which melancholy and 'idiot laughter' are never far apart.
Alex Wong is the author of two collections of poetry, Poems Without Irony (2016) and Shadow and Refrain (2021). He has also edited and introduced selections from the work of the Victorian writers A.C. Swinburne, Walter Pater and Alice Meynell.
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Stitch! stitch! stitch! In poverty, hunger, and dirt, And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,— Would that its tone could reach the Rich!— She sang this “Song of the Shirt!”
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Publication date: 15 May 2026
36pp, staple-bound in card covers
Printed on Munken Pure paper in East London by Angel Press
ISBN: 978-1-9195507-1-8
A Selection of Poems edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod
Headless Poet Introduction 1.3
Publishing 24 July 2026, pre-order/subscribe now
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Edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod, this new selection brings the full range of Lilian Bowes Lyon’s moving and memorable poetry back into print for the first time since 1948.
Lilian Bowes Lyon (1895-1949) was a unique poetic voice amid the political turmoil of the 1930s and 40s, “working with concentrated skilfulness to express her experience of England… as a country undergoing irreversible change”.
Born in Northumberland, whose chilly, glittering landscape inspired her throughout her life, she lived in the East End during the war and wrote about her experience of the Blitz, bravely exposing herself to its dangers while her own health deteriorated.
Bowes Lyon’s poems, with their richly patterned cadences and deep sympathy for both the human and natural world, were closer in spirit to the raptures of Gerard Manley Hopkins than the urbanity of the Auden group. Her voice, however, was her own - lyrical, tender, ecstatic, tough - and praised by contemporaries like Edith Sitwell, John Betjeman and Walter de la Mare.
Jeremy Noel-Tod teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, the Complete Poems of R.F. Langley and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem.
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Like snow bees in the night,
Softly they arrive;
Our eyes are hurt
By the surprise of love
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Publication date: 24 July 2026
32pp, staple-bound in card covers
Printed on Munken Pure paper in East London by Angel Press
ISBN: 978-1-9195507-2-5
A choice of popular EARLY MODERN VERSE made by VICTORIA MOUL
with an introduction and notes
Headless Poet Introduction 1.1
How should we react to the vagaries of love and desire; the allure of power or fame and the uncertainty of fortune; the experience of war and the inevitability of death?
In early modern England it was taken for granted that a good poem is both beautiful and useful: that it teaches or expresses something that it is helpful to remember, as one tries to conduct a decent life. This pamphlet presents twenty poems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which are, in most cases, not well known today. They have been chosen to reflect the kinds of verse that were most popular with readers at the time, but also for their beauty and utility.
Featuring twenty poets, from Mary Sidney Herbert and Walter Raleigh to Morgan Llwyd O Wynedd and Payne Fisher, including poems unavailable in any other modern edition.
Victoria Moul is a British literary critic, scholar, poet and translator living in Paris.
Read an interview with Victoria Moul
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Dazzled thus with height of place,
Whilst our hopes our wits beguile,
No man marks the narrow space
‘Twixt a prison and a smile.
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Publication date: 09 March 2026
36pp, staple-bound in card covers
Printed on Munken Pure paper in East London by Angel Press
ISBN: 978-1-9-9195507-0-1
Orders are posted within the week and often sooner.