Rack Press Poetry: Latest Reviews

Tuesday, 3 August 2010

Latest Reviews

Ian Parks's A Paston Letter is warmly reviewed in the latest issue of Long Poem Magazine where it is praised as "a haunting, elegiac poem" and it is good to see a reviewer paying attention to the poem's form and verse technique and talking intelligently about them. David Kennedy's Mistral is also reviewed in the latest issue of Stride.

Don't forget that you can catch the Rack Press poets live at the Presteigne Festival in Wales later this month on Sunday 29th August. We would love to see you there.

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Titles Currently inPrint

Airs and Ditties of No Man's Land

Christopher Reid

Christopher Reid’s poetry includes Arcadia, Pea Soup, and Katerina Brac. He was Poetry Editor at Faber and Faber from 1991 to 1999. He has also written poems for children and has edited the Letters of Ted Hughes. His collection, A Scattering, won the 2009 Costa Book of the Year award and his most recent long poem, The Song of Lunch was adapted for BBC television in October last year starring Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson.

Airs and Ditties of No Man’s Land is being set to music by Colin Matthews and will be premiered at the 2011 BBC Proms Season at the Albert Hall this summer.

“Reid is a poet who lives on in the mind, becomes part of one’s own inner vocabulary. In every poetic generation there are not more than one or two like that.” - John Bayley, Poetry Review

This title is now sold out

Dream Endings

Roísín Tierney

Róisín Tierney was born in Dublin in 1963 and studied psychology and philosophy at University College Dublin. She moved to London in 1985 and she attended Michael Donaghy’s poetry workshop at City University 1998-2002.

Although Tierney has been published widely in magazines and group pamphlets, and her poems have won many prizes, Dream Endings represents her first solo appearance between book covers.

Dream Endings begins with a glimpse of the poet’s dying sister and concludes in high style with an unusually exuberant funeral. In between, Róisín Tierney assembles a cast of rare misfits and eccentrics in order to explore the interconnected themes of illness, madness, incest and death. Her vision is at all times tender and non-judgemental, and her language remarkable both for the limpidity of its surface and the depths it allows us to apprehend.

Catching On: an elegiac sequence for Matt Simpson (1936-2009)

Angela Topping

Angela Topping met the poet Matt Simpson when she was 18 and formed a lifelong friendship with him. Her first book, Dandelions for Mothers’ Day (Stride 1988) was dedicated to him and she edited a festschrift for his 60th birthday, Making Connections (Stride 1996). Her New and Selected Poems, The Fiddle, was published in 1999 (Stride); The Way We Came (Bluechrome) came out in 2007. Salt have published a children’s collection, The New Generation (2010) and a chapbook, I Sing of Bricks (2011). She is a freelance poet and author based in Cheshire and is married with two adult daughters.

“Angela Topping’s poems are exploratory, imaginative and tensile. Her acute ear and observant eye enliven every subject she touches. A poet of great charm and sensitivity who has earned the right to be taken seriously.” – Ian Parks

Get Real!

Nicholas Murray

On 12th May 2010, six days after the British general election had resulted in no party having an overall majority, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, leaders respectively of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, agreed to form a coalition Government. The coalition immediately proposed a massive programme of cuts in government spending, unforeseen in its extent in either of the two parties’ manifestos. To their critics this was motivated more by an ideological desire to roll back the frontiers of the state than by fiscal prudence. On 9th December 2010 the coalition Government, following proposals from Lord Browne, former chief executive of BP which was responsible for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, agreed to allow student tuition fees to be increased to £9000 a year, in spite of Liberal Democrat election candidates having signed public pledges never to agree to the existing cap on fees being removed. As a result, large and sometimes violent student protests erupted in central London towards the end of 2010.

These events are the background to this scathing verse broadside against the coalition Government.

2010 Titles

Oscar & Henry

by Katy Evans-Bush

Katy Evans-Bush was born in New York and has been living in London since she was 19. Her first collection, Me and the Dead, was published by Salt Publishing in 2008, and she writes the literary blog Baroque in Hackney. Her second collection is due out with Salt in autumn 2010.

“For Henry, having two countries meant staged risk, and privacy. For Oscar, having the world meant everything bet on the one toss. In a 1920s Modernist trope, this sequence hints at big unanalysed scandals by almost making them cockney rhyming slang: Evans-Bush shows us Two Great Late Victorians through the prism of the 1920s, even while she looks back ninety years at the Modernists, in a double manoeuvre.

In literary judgment we think about sex, but in our own lives we think about love. An equal attention to Henry James and Oscar Wilde at once can illuminate both. Henry remains, at this stage, Evans-Bush's object of quiet love: touchstone to a vision of love that is the secret, and the secret joy of these poems."

Ira Lightman

“In one of the best debut collections for ages, Katy Evans-Bush rises to the challenge of finding words for our times… Her work is various, educated and promiscuously open to experience … stylish and funny, cultured and humane.”

Ian Duhig, on Me and the Dead

A Paston Letter

by Ian Parks

This beautifully rendered sequence recreates the voice of Margery Paston and her thwarted love for Richard Calle, from the classic collection of fifteenth century texts, The Paston Letters.

Ian Parks was one of the Poetry Society New Poets in 1996. He was made a Hawthornden Fellow in 1991 and has taught creative writing at the universities of Sheffield, Hull, Oxford and Leeds. His collections include A Climb Through Altered Landscapes (Blackwater, 1998), Shell island (Waywiser, 2006) and The Cage (Flux Gallery Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in The Liberal, The Independent on Sunday, London Magazine, Stand, Poetry Review and The Observer. His Love Poems 1979-2009 is published by Flux Gallery Press.

'Reading a poem by Ian Parks is like hearing your name uttered in the din of a public place: you hear it regardless of the background noise.'

Peter Dale

'A poetry of literal and metaphorical hauntings, of fugitive experiences and landscapes. Parks is, particularly, a master of the brief narrative, short stories or novellas stripped of all but the essentials. There's a care for precision, a refusal of easy rhetoric, that gives to much of Parks' work a tellingly powerful reticence which it is easy to admire.'

Glyn Pursglove

Here's to the Home Country

by Philip Morre

Philip Morre lives and works in Venice, a city whose fugitive presence inhabits these highly individual poems.

'Why do Philip Morre’s poems sound on first reading so strange and so familiar?

Because they are the exact opposite of the calculated effusions of those somnambulists of the poetical scene, who routinely peddle a fake cinematic fog with a ruthless eye on the most trivial tendencies of the market'

Riccardo Held

'Philip Morre's witty, melancholy poems pay ambiguous homage to the idea of a 'home country'.

They read like missives from expatria, written by a poet who mixes an easeful cosmopolitanism with a peculiarly English jadedness.It's an unusual combination which produces sharp,elegant poems of understated but authentic emotional power.'

Patrick McGuinness

Mistral

by David Kennedy

David Kennedy has published three collections with Salt: The President of Earth: New & Selected Poems (2002); The Roads (2004); and The Devil’s Bookshop (2007). His most recent publication is the sequence MY Atrocity (Oystercatcher Press, 2009). He is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull.

‘…a book that meditates on a pleasingly varied range of modern-day subjects, from the London bombings to the composer John Cage.’

Scotland on Sunday on The Devil’s Bookshop.

‘This is a truly fascinating and inventive book, not least for its style and variety, but also for its accomplished poetic, its mature sensibility and its great humour.’

Stride on The Roads.

‘Kennedy offers an unblinking poetics free of specious closure…The journey, as in Cavafy’s ‘Ithika’, is all. One arrives at the end of his poems…entranced” –

Poetry Review on The President of Earth.

Rack Press Poetry

Tuesday, 3 August 2010

Latest Reviews

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