Launch of New Titles 2015

Eleven of the 33 Rack Press Poets at the London
launch of the new series of pamphlets

Four new Rack Press pamphlets for 2015 were launched on Wednesday, 4th February in London when the Press also celebrated its 10th birthday at the Art Workers' Guild in Bloomsbury. The new quartet, we hope, is as rich a mix as ever and all can be purchased here from our Paypal button (£5 each, free postage) or at independent booksellers (Amazon has decided to list small press poetry publications as "not available" so of course don't use them!).

Here is a link to Fiona Pitt-Kethley reading a poem from her new Rack collection, Mineral Adventures.

De’Ath & Daughters 
by A.C. Bevan



A C Bevan’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies and newspapers in the UK, Europe and the US.  He is the author of three pamphlet collections to date, and lives and works in Bristol. The poems in this collection explore sex, love and death through the ages. These are tales of some of the great heroines of folklore, myth and history retold for our modern age.
“Terrifically witty”
Don Paterson
 “Elegant and – to me – mysterious poems. And funny.”  –
Roger McGough
 “Takes us with him all the way, in a breathless trajectory to a perfectly timed ending.”  –  Bristol Review of Books


Hooligans
by Katrina Naomi

Katrina Naomi wrote Hooligans after learning that her great-grandmother was involved with the Women’s Social and Political Union – one of the more militant Suffragette movements. Hooligans considers the nature of women’s, and occasionally men’s, protests for the vote, ranging from violent demonstrations and window breaking, to imprisonment and force feeding.

Katrina is completing a PhD at Goldsmiths in creative writing, with a focus on violence in poetry, and teaches at Falmouth University. Her previous collections include The Girl with the Cactus Handshake, which was shortlisted for the London New Poetry Award and Lunch at the Elephant & Castle, which won the Templar Poetry Pamphlet Competition.



Alabaster Girls
by Damian Walford Davies

The poems in Alabaster Girls weigh up the ‘supple heft’ of bodies – erotic, stony, planetary and spiritual, confronting both ‘the cant of the machine’ and ‘the telemetry of love’.  Alabaster Girls ‘tartly confronts the world’s cruelties, revealing the unsettling proximity between guns and golden dust’.
Damian Walford Davies was born in 1971. He teaches at Cardiff University. His co-authored collection, Whiteout, appeared in 2006. Suit of Lights (a Wales Literature Exchange ‘Bookshelf’ Choice) was published in 2009, followed by Witch in 2012. Judas will appear in 2015. His collections are published by Seren.



Mineral Adventures
by Fiona Pitt-Kethley

Fiona Pitt-Kethley is the author of more than twenty prose and poetry books. Since 2002 she has been living in Spain with her husband, grandmaster James Plaskett and their son Alex. She lives close to the Sierra Minera and became an avid collector of stones, joining a local society and going on excursions with them. Mineral Adventures is based around various, mostly rare, minerals and the places where they are found. Minerals often have a unique form peculiar to a particular place. You only realise this when you start to collect. The poems seek to portray the rarities of the minerals and the places they come from.
"She is a dedicated poet, getting better all the time.” – A.N.Wilson

Susan Grindley

Rack Press was very sad to learn of the death on 4th December of Susan Grindley, a fine poet and a great friend and supporter of Rack Press whose pamphlet, New Reader we published in 2013.  We were with her when she read at Ledbury Poetry Festival, the Wheatsheaf in Soho, the Poetry Book Fair in Red Lion Square and other venues. We are very pleased to publish below a brief tribute from some of her close friends:-






Susan Grindley

Many of you will have heard the sad news that Susan Grindley died on 4th December 2014.  Her pamphlet New Reader (published by Rack Press in 2013) was praised for its elegance and craft.  Susan began writing poetry in 1997, when she joined Michael Donaghy’s Word Shop at City University. She became an active and enthusiastic participant in the London poetry scene, as both a performer and a supporter of others, making many lasting friendships. 

Susan was a founder member of The Group, based at The Poetry Society. She was well read in poetry as well as in wider literature and could spontaneously offer a quote or a useful reference. Other members of the group were impressed by Susan’s ability to give constructive, informed criticism. Her poem, ‘Gobby Deegan’s Riposte’, became the title poem of the pamphlet that The Group produced in 2004 and has delighted audiences at numerous readings. Susan performed her work regularly in London poetry venues and was also well known on the Essex poetry circuit, reading at the Essex Poetry Festival. She built up a reputation as a skilled and meticulous poet, attaining an impressive range of poetry successes and awards. Many of her poems have been published in magazines, such as Magma, Poetry News, and South Bank Poetry and on-line, in Limelight and Nth Position.  The title poem of New Reader was highly commended in the Larkin and East Riding Poetry Competition in 2011 and she was also highly commended in The Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition. She was invited to read her work at The Edinburgh Book Festival and the Ledbury Poetry Festival. 

Most recently, she featured in the pamphlet Sounds of the Front Bell (Stonewood Press 2014).  A review in London Grip points to the poignancy of Susan’s poem, in which she likens Victoria Park to a Chinese landscape:

                      Next stop, I’m getting off the bus

                      By the time it pulls away

                      I shall have disappeared in my grey coat.

                      Look for my red shoes half way up the picture.

She will be immensely missed by those who knew and loved her and by her audience of poetry readers.

by June Lausch, Valerie Josephs and Annie Freud.

Rack Press "Small Press Publisher of the Month" at the London Review Bookshop

We are very pleased that the London Review Bookshop has selected us as Small Press Publisher of the Month in January.  The LRB shop is our favourite London bookshop and the best place in fact to buy our publications.  Here is what the Shop's poetry specialist, the excellent John Clegg, himself a very fine poet, writes on the LRB blog:-

Probably it’s best for small presses to aim at doing one thing really well. Rack Press, run by the indomitable Nick and Sue Murray, has for ten years coming up this February produced lively, interesting poetry pamphlets in identical grey-beige covers. Four pamphlets are released at the start of each year; the bookshop has just taken delivery of the new batch, with titles from Fiona Pitt-Kethley (Mineral Adventures, an account of building up a stone collection which is much more exciting than it sounds), Damian Walford Davies (Alabaster Girls, whose high point is an excellent poem in couplets about a foolish attempt to break the land-speed record), Katrina Naomi (Hooligans, a family memoir of the Suffragettes) and A C Bevan (De’Ath and Daughters, which I’ve been desperate to read since seeing him in the shop for the launch of Magma 61, and which doesn’t disappoint).

Rack’s back catalogue is full of good bits. Katy Evans-Bush’s Oscar and Henry is a dramatic monologue double-act from Wilde and James; David Harsent’s Songs for the Same Earth was set to music by Harrison Birtwistle, and presents a subtly different text to the one eventually collected in last year’s Fire Songs (Faber and Faber). Ian Parks’s The Cavafy Variations are some of the best passes through the impossible-to-translate poet I’ve seen, and Richard Price’s ‘improvisations’ on the French renaissance poet Louise Labé (Lute Variations) are also thoroughly worth the price of admission. I think my favourite of their pamphlets so far, though, is David Kennedy’s Mistral – working in the genre Peter Riley has identified as modern French pastoral, the poems seem simultaneously open and reticent, quibbling and broadminded, likeable without fawning.
The press has had a very good year, winning the Michael Marks Award for Best Poetry Publisher. (Samantha Wynne Rhyderrch’s Rack publication Lime and Winter was also shortlisted for Best Pamphlet.) In their citation, the judges praised Rack’s ‘elegant simple design’ as well as ‘their mix of experienced poets and new voices, and the way their work engages with the world’. To which we say, yes yes very good, and may they keep on going for another ten years. All Rack’s 2015 pamphlets, plus all the pamphlets from their back catalogue which are still in print and a few which aren’t, are available from the London Review Bookshop at £5 a pop.