Nearly sixty people attended last night's launch in London at the Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury of the 2008 series of Rack Press pamphlets by Byron Beynon, David Wheatley, and Steve Griffiths (seen here, left to right in that order, with Rack Press publisher, Nicholas Murray, at the lectern). The poets read from their work and there was a brisk trade at the bookstall. Thanks to all who came and gave their support.
The next Rack Press event will be on 11 April at the Dylan Thomas Centre at Swansea when all three poets will again be reading.
For a comment on David Wheatley's Lament for Ali Farka Touré see this link which reads: "Wheatley’s is single longish piece, admirably avoiding the folklorique, or the touristique: “This belongs in no book. / If found in a book / consider it lost / and return it to its keeper.” (And, to keep one off balance, if one begins to think one’s “got” Mali, or Africa—references to things like “the best / pizza in Bamako.”) And a fine sense of the too-ready circumambiences (that is, the subterfugal flow and mock-reflowering) of story, the mean taking and exchange and refurbishing: “Traders’ tales: / we tell you these things / and you tell us them back. / The masks discarded / after the dance haggle / with us over the price / of a rich, hollow laugh.” Holding one’s own: “Do not / look to the sky for the sun: I think we are inside the sun.”
