all donut, no holes

Okay, now I'm recovering a bit I just want to flag up the excellent couple of new pamphlets from the equally excellent - in fact, more excellent because they are that without which, etc - Donut Press, which were launched on Friday night.

Colette Bryce's The Observations of Aleksandr Svetlov is made up of a series of poems around a character who apparently came to her, and hung around - "I have a new respect for people who write novels, and what it's like for them, putting up with all these people who just show up," she said - until she had written these poems. And Roddy Lumsden's super try again is made up of what he calls overlays, or homeopathic versions - poems whose sources lie in lines found elsewhere. And, in an overlay of its own, the invite poster above takes its line "This is no weekday bubble up!" from one of Roddy's poems.

(Ms B did something like this a few years ago, writing poems based on other people's words. I patched together, rewrote and edited a series of emails from one person, and a long anecdote another friend told me in the pub. Trouble was, when the friend saw the poem - which had taken me months of work to get right - he assumed he was the author!)

Hats off here to Andy Ching, a bloke who started a tiny press making pamphlets in his spare time - and got it totally right from the word go - and whose books, with matt laminate covers, lovely typography and endpapers (you don't even get those at Faber anymore) are more beautiful than most of the poshest poetry books around, with none of that deadly small-press gentility, either.

It is my considered opinion that we are at the beginning of a renaissance of smaller presses in Britain, and Donut - whose first two full-length collections (by the estimable Tim Wells and the far taller Tim Turnbull) were both shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection last year - is near the front of the charge.

I think he's also, by stealth, rediscovering a form: the best of these pamphlets, like John Stammers' Buffalo Bills, are things that would never have worked as full collections, and might have sat awkwardly as part or half of one. They are legitimising smaller books, giving poets more flexibility of format. Usually you just hear of pamphlets or "chapbooks" (why do I hae that word so much? It seems so affected!) as something people have because they don't have a full collection yet, whereas in the old days - I mean not so long ago - poets would publish their littler things in between main collections... So I really like these.

The pamphlets are £5 and are just the right size to fit in your pocket, should you fancy (but please don't) a Shelley moment...

And it was a great party. I always hate it when people blog up great parties, you're like "oo-oh, bully for you!" but this time it really was a great party.