The Blue Room

This is a collection of the first year's writing from The Blue Room, and the first of many anthologies we hope. The writing is exciting, fresh and individual, including both poems and tantalising extracts of short stories and longer prose.

Editors: Lisa Matthews, Sheila Mulhern, Ellen Phethean, Jane Wood. With a foreword by John Hegley

ISBN 0 9520090 5 6
£4.00 plus 60p P&P

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The Blue Room,
129 Osborne Road,
Jesmond,
Newcastle Upon Tyne,
NE2 2TB.

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Reviewd by Lin O'Hara, Northern Review September 1999

It seems somehow appropriate that the first anthology from The Blue Room should come out at a time when Neil Astley's Bloodaxe imprint celebrates 21 years of encouraging new poets and welcoming new audiences.

It's probably fair to say that Bloodaxe paved the way for the Blue Room (which has just notched up two years of monthly readings in Newcastle pubs) and other new writers' groups - though it's also true that in those two years the Blue Room has flourished and grown.

Their Sunday reading now provide a platform for new writers (mostly women) to read their work and for new audiences to enjoy original work in a non-traditional arts venue.

Holding poetry readings upstairs in a pub ... does not, of course, guarantee a non-traditional audience but The Blue Room has played to packed houses and plenty of enthusiastic ones.

This anthology mixes work by complete newcomers and more experienced writers, poetry and prose in the same all-embracing spirit as the reading themselves. It's an uneven but interesting collection with several gems and a few near misses.

Maureen Almond's 27 Newhouse Road, Esh Winning is wonderfully evocative: I defy any postwar child not to recognise either the house or the grandmother she describes. My scalp prickled with recognition at the sounds and sensations.

Heather Young catches the locked-in pain of a desiccated marriage in Silent Storms and Chrissie Glazebrook's prose fragment Smile Please revels in the speech patterns of disaffected youth as well as showing an Alan Bennett ear for brand names and advertisers' jargon without hiding the emptiness behind the narrator's sharp, defiant jokiness.

Elsewhere, there is sadness, beauty, wit and savagery, often woven together in the same pieces.

The Blue Room plan to widen their audience and encourage more new writers. They deserve to succeed.