On 19 November 2026, Yellow House Publishing will release Restoration, the second poetry collection by Stephen Knox.Those who encountered Stephen through his debut collection, Sensing Wonder, will recognise a poet who pays close attention to the things around him. In Restoration, that attentiveness remains, but the field of vision has widened.
This is a collection interested in what we do with the world as we find it. Stephen moves comfortably between the apparently ordinary and questions of considerably greater weight. A walk through a glen, a dog running free, an old kitchen knife, a family memory or a moment beside the sea can sit alongside poems concerned with public anger, modern communication, environmental damage, division and the consequences of conflict. That movement is important to the character of the collection.
Stephen does not abandon the everyday in order to address larger questions. He approaches those questions... through it. There is humour here too. Restoration is not a collection that remains permanently solemn. Stephen's observations of domestic life, ageing, technology and his own encounters with the modern world provide moments of wit and self-awareness. They give the collection room to breathe and retain the conversational quality that is central to his writing.
Towards the latter part of the collection, however, the focus increasingly settles upon peace. It is here that the title Restoration begins to carry its fullest weight. Peace is considered not merely as an absence of violence, but as something that asks something of us: forgiveness rather than revenge, attention to another person's story, mercy, neighbourliness and the willingness to look again.
In Peace Baby, Stephen turns specifically to the Good Friday Agreement, presenting the peace born in 1998 as something vulnerable that had to be coaxed into life and cared for; and which, twenty-five years later, remains alive. It is a characteristically direct image and one that sits naturally within the wider collection.
For Yellow House Publishing, Restoration continues our commitment to publishing writing from these islands that is prepared to engage seriously with place, identity and the society in which we live, while remaining first and foremost the work of the individual writer.
Stephen Knox has produced a collection recognisably his own: observant, accessible, occasionally playful, sometimes challenging and ultimately hopeful. We look forward to bringing it to readers this November.
Christoph Thackaberry
Free Press Publisher