In her introduction to Alessandro Bava and Harry Burke’s City of God, recently published by Version House, Spanish writer Luna Miguel quotes young Mexican poet David Meza: “Poetry is like throwing stones at the spaceship where God is.” City of God is a collaboration between a British poet and an Italian architect, published by a German publisher, and Miguel takes the quote to mean that “Poets have finally come to understand that it is not necessary to belong to the same nation, not the same continent, to know that binding links tie them… The stone has been ripped from the ground. The stone has been thrown into space.”
Burke himself makes a similar point, about the desire to publish now in electronic form. “One of the ideas I have,” he writes, “is that if we can make this strong project that people download into their iTunes or Play Books library, even if they don’t necessarily read it very thoroughly straight away, they might be stuck at a train station or airport while travelling without Wi-Fi or 3G and so read it because it’s the only thing they seem to have on their iPad. The point is to stand out as a precursor to not just an emerging market but emerging habits, and find a place for things like poetry there.”
Version House has a track record of publishing innovative ebooks that make the most of the possibilities of the digital text, such as the quarterly journal General Fine Arts, which mixes poetry, music and Ascii art. All are available in formats for every electronic reader, including iBooks, Google Play and Kindle – and if you still can’t find it, well, there are other ways. Burke recounts sharing a copy via email with a fan in Israel: “It was great to have that interaction because it seems much more plausible that an ebook would reach Israel than a small print book.” The ebook is a thrown stone too.
