originally published in 1999 A4, 30pp Veer Books 1002 & Writers Forum, 2024‘The voice “dead a hundred years … from the bottom of the Thames … “ speaks: “my friend and I tore up the pavements and sucked all the ghosts out … “. Thereafter through 3 chapters it modulates into collage, disconnected discursive fragments, fractured narrative and a derisive scenario; throughout death lurks in the background of a society defined by political oppression and haunted by its spectral victims.“we crawl out from the river and knock on the doors of dead poets when they answer with violence we are less than amazed … “The challenge is a genuine collectivity: “from highgate through hackney and holloway towards london”.This collection from 1999 foreshadows the themes of later work with a less relentless approach. But though more unpredictably deployed its energies are no less obvious.’

Paperback, 120x210mm, 38 pp Veer2 Publication 006, June 2021. 'In Mudchute, the difficult structures of language are carefully treated. Infancy, attachment, ambivalence and loss are disassembled and reconfigured amidst gaunt hedgerows, fuel farm repositories, the bouncy castle and the DLR as Betteridge’s lyric voice navigates the edge of fragmentation. Deeply felt and experimental, apprehensive of and devoted to both the unbearable and the comic aspects of experience and memory, these poems perform the difficult bonds of social life even as they resist them: ‘you cannot live in the house that you are / with everyone’.'  (Helen Charman)'The poems assembled in Mudchute survive the disciplinary function of close reading in demanding and often beautiful ways. They are resistant objects, made to be held in the mouth and turned until the edges of the terms are worn. Across the collection, this Winnicottian regress to 'barest idiom' encounters a forensic vocabulary for ‘all the mute sparkplugs of accreted / emotional and physical violence’ that imprint our lived environments, developmental experiences, and the muddied recesses of generational memory. Torqued between the nuclear family, the experiential group, and the enervated provision of state institutions, the daily work of care becomes at once ‘the poverty of administered / atomized / gapping’ and the intimate horizon of a ‘grazed / lip- / stirred in the face of group kindness.’ It is a horizon we have called communism and reparative reading and family abolition. In Betteridge's work, it is the minimum.' (Fred Carter)     This is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.

Veer2 Publication 034, December 2023 Softcover, 13x26cm, 44 pages £1 from the sale of each copy of this book will be donated to Palestine Action's legal defence funds www.palestineaction.org‘Picture a pencil curved, implausibly, parabolically. An implement bending back on itself (core straining) so as to be drawing the surest line, even as its eraser-end is simultaneously rubbing that graphite out. What remains almost never was: mark as memorial to foreclosure. Examined from a certain angle, the un-line flickers in and out of thereness. On registration, it lives, it goes forth. Sub rosa, it knows never to clear its throat. It has learnt to calibrate its signature; it can evade infra-red. Propelling itself through the narrowest channels, it proceeds with resolve, flayingly. Mattar’s And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring is taut as writing can be. The tone she makes sound is singular and desperately (gloriously) intent.'- Sarah Hayden‘Piercing and lucid in its exposition of atmospheric violence and total erasure, Mira Mattar gets to the grain of how the languages of selfhood, mediated but also inhibited by the force of the ‘un-universal’, become complicit in forming the sovereign imperative to self-determination, ‘oh arrogant ambition / to transform / you & keep myself / plumed’, through the reproduction of a ‘contested field / of meaning’, one both marked by the lure and ruse of psychic stability as the real fantasy of occupation, and immanent to concrete, unknown modes of personal resistance and collective recovery thread like a ‘rope / in a knot in a line / of knots’, an inherited ‘excess of memory / mostly portal.’ Mattar carefully gleans in its undecidability, given over to moments of precarious decision without ties or duplicity.'- James GoodwinThis is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.

'From a premier contemporary, murmur invitates us to revised attention, to a verbal & typographic spatiality where operates a liberating vulnerability to what irrupts.'  Full colour work, available for the first time in print.