A New Pamphlet by Nicholas Murray

 

Our last pamphlet of 2020, which has been our 15th anniversary year, is A Quartet in Winter by Nicholas Murray published on 1st December.

In the fourth of a series of formal verse satires that began in 2011 with Get Real! and which included Trench Feet (2014) and A Dog’s Brexit (Melos, 2017) Nicholas Murray evokes the Welsh Marches in early winter, when “frost lays its dust-sheet on the Radnor Hills”, contemplating, in rustic confinement in a pandemic, a world of “smirking kleptocrats on giant screens”, and the fate of the Earth “we treat so roughly”.

Nicholas Murray is a poet and literary biographer living in Powys. His most recent full-length poetry collection, The Yellow Wheelbarrow, was published in 2019 by the Melos Press. 

In The Manchester Review Ian Pople praised: “...the quiet rhythmic pulse with underpins all Murray’s poems. That assured rhythmic control is often allied with a closely observational sense in Murray’s writing”.

You can order the new pamphlet here (see side panel) post free at £5.

More Good Reviews

 

We were very pleased to see that A.C. Bevan’s pamphlet Field Trips in the Anthropocene is well reviewed in the latest issue of PN Review (No 256) as well as in the new issue of Stand. You can order it here (post-free, same day dispatch) and also other pamphlets published with it this year: Fiona Larkin’s A Dovetail of Breath, Stephen Capus’ 24 Hours and Elinor Wyn Reynolds’ Your Careful Heart/Dy Galon Ofalus [in Welsh and English]. You might like to try a set of all four, each individually signed by the author, for £15, a saving of £5.

Irish Times praises Róisín Tierney

We were pleased that the Irish Times reviewer, Sean Hewitt, liked Roisin Tierney’s pamphlet Mock-Orange calling the poems “skilful and atmospheric”.  He continued: “These unsettling dark lyrics have a wonderful verbal energy; a mythic imagination.”  

Copies of the pamphlet are still available here and you can also read two new poems of Roisin in the latest issue of Dark Horse magazine.

You can see Róisín reading from the pamphlet on our You Tube channel.

Special Sale Offer on Selected Titles

We are pleased to announce a special sale offer on selected titles from 2005-2018. 

Post free in the UK. 

All the following titles can be ordered for £2 each:

Soft Mutation by Nicky Arscott

Sherpas by John Barnie

Alabaster Girls by Damian Walford Davies

Minim by Hazel Frew

Nebamun's Tomb by John Greening

The Blue Cell by Anna Lewis

Inside the Animal House by Kathy Miles

Blood and Other Elements by Dawn Morgan

Mineral Adventures by Fiona Pitt-Kethley

Catching On by Angela Topping

To order choose from the Paypal sidebar to the right of this.

If you see a title from our pre-2019 backlist (scroll down on the right to see the full list) that you would like and can’t see it listed in the special offer simply email us and we will try to accommodate your order at the sale price.

Fifteen Years; fifty poets

24 Hours

Here is another poem from our new season of pamphlets read by Stephen Capus from his new pamphlet 24 Hours. All these pamphlets can be ordered directly from us here, post-free, with immediate dispatch.

Another New Poem from Rack Press

Here is another poem from our new spring quartet of pamphlets and we are sorry that current circumstances mean that we weren’t able to launch these poems live – but we shall definitely be doing so once it becomes possible again.

The poet is AC Bevan reading from his new pamphlet (which can be ordered here post free) Field Trips in the Anthropocene.

A New Poem from Rack Press

Here is Fiona Larkin reading from her new Rack Press pamphlet A Dovetail of Breath which you can order here for immediate dispatch.

William Palmer: Guardian Poem of the Week

The poem “Letter to my Daughter” from William Palmer’s full-length collection The Water Steps has been selected as this week’s “Poem of the Week” by Carol Rumens in The Guardian.  This fine poem appears in the collection published by Rack Press in 2017 which Carol Rumens calls “a mature and impressive achievement”. You can order a copy of the collection here.

Poetry and Pandemics

We were very sad to learn that our distributors, Central Books, who make sure that all our publications get to the bookshops, have had to close like everyone else until at least the end of April but we will continue to supply orders directly (post free, same day dispatch) from our website here until the Post Offices close or the stamps run out (but we expect neither of those things to happen).
Individual copies of our new pamphlets published on 17th March can be bought here as well as the best bargain we offer: a set of the four new pamphlets each individually signed and numbered by the author priced at £15 for the set instead of £20.

We hope that all our readers keep safe at this very difficult time.

Buy this packaged set of the 4 new pamphlets for only £15
(the other two from Elinor Wyn Reynolds and Stephen Capus are shyly hiding beneath the outer  ones!)

New Titles Released 17th March but Launch Cancelled

Four new titles are published on 17th March but with great regret we have to announce that owing to the current situation we have had to cancel the launch event and party which will be rescheduled as soon as it is prudent to do so.  The good news is that all titles can be ordered now from the drop-down menu here. You can also buy packs of our bright new 15th birthday postcard featuring the names of all 50 of our poets.

Our birthday postcard you can order here

NEW TITLES March 2020

Field Trips in the Anthropocene
A.C.Bevan
24 Hours
Stephen Capus
A Dovetail of Breath
Fiona Larkin
Dy Galon Ofalus/Your Careful Heart
Elinor Wyn Reynolds

Rack Press is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary this year and also marking having reached a total of 50 poets with the launch of these four new pamphlets including its first ever Welsh/English bilingual pamphlet.

Field Trips in the Anthropocene

A.C.Bevan

24 Hours

Stephen Capus

A Dovetail of Breath

Fiona Larkin

Dy Galon Ofalus/Your Careful Heart

Elinor Wyn Reynolds

A. C. Bevan’s fifth poetry collection explores the terrain of the new environmental epoch, in which mankind has become the driving force – if not the “extinction pulse”– of global ecological change. As our fossil economy, industrialisation & rampant consumerism create a human-induced climate crisis of increasingly catastrophic weather, mass species extinction & a rising tide of old & new existential threats, these are poems for our Geological Age.

“Bevan is both a poet of élan & technical virtuosity… not only dexterous, but dexterity at the service of reflections on a very real world” Ian Pople, The Manchester Review

Stephen Capus’ first collection captures the ephemeral impressions, feelings and thoughts of a single day through a series of spare, understated, exact poems, the skilful formal structure sharpening epigrammatically the significance of the otherwise unformed immediacy of the experiences they convey.

Stephen Capus was born in West Cross near Swansea, and studied Russian at Birmingham University and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. He has contributed poems, translations and reviews to various periodicals and anthologies, including Acumen, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, and The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. His essay on translating the poetry of Georgiy Ivanov appeared in the magazine Cardinal Points, published by the Department of Slavic Studies, Brown University, in 2018.

*

Fiona Larkin was born in London to Irish parents, and was educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and  Royal Holloway. She organises innovative poetry events with Corrupted Poetry. Her work was highly commended in the Forward Prizes 2019 single poem category, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and Aesthetica Award. Poems have appeared in Best New British and Irish Poets 2018, In Transit: Poems of Travel, and in a wide range of journals. A Dovetail of Breath is her first pamphlet. 

‘In ten spare, exact and immensely moving poems, Fiona Larkin offers us a daughter, watching a father’s slow neurological decline. What can be done when words are forgotten, unable to be drawn from the ‘inarticulate thicket’? Larkin explores language as a bonding device, something that roots us to people and place, but asks us to consider what happens when that comes under threat. It is a remarkable debut.’   

Rebecca Goss

*

Elinor Wyn Reynolds comes from Carmarthen, she has lived in many parts of Wales, but she is back living in Myrddin’s old town, with her family. She is a poet, an author and a playwright. She believes that poetry should be read, spoken, heard and experienced – poetry is in every heartbeat and every breath. 

This is her first collection.

Happy Birthday to Us

From a recent Press Release:-

RACK PRESS CELEBRATES 15 YEARS OF
INDEPENDENT POETRY PUBLISHING

The award-winning Welsh poetry pamphlet press, Rack Press, is celebrating in 2020 its 15th year of independent publishing by releasing in March its 50th poet and its first bilingual Welsh/English pamphlet. A series of readings and events are planned throughout the year culminating in a public celebration in words and music at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre on 15th October.

Rack Press launched its first pamphlets in January 2005 and the latest quartet of pamphlets for 2020 are shortly to be announced.

Rack Press was founded by Nicholas and Susan Murray and is based in the small Welsh village of Kinnerton in Powys in the Welsh Marches. It won the 2014 Michael Marks Award for poetry pamphlet publishing (an award for which it has been shortlisted four times) and in 2012 Róisín Tierney’s Dream Endings won the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlet of the Year, an award for which Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s Lime & Winter was shortlisted in 2014.

Rack Press has always pursued an independent policy of publishing good poetry by a range of poets, some with leading reputations, some unknown to the wider poetry-reading public at the time of publication. Début collections and pamphlets by experienced hands have been published together and Welsh, Irish, and Scottish poets have been well-represented. An equal number of male and female poets have been published.

Rack Press has never received any public grant or subsidy but is indebted to the Michael Marks Foundation for the 2014 award that has underpinned its publishing programme for the past six years. Central Books is a valuable distributor of its publications.

Critical praise for Rack has come from many quarters:-

Rack Press ever impresses – Poetry Review
The consistently reliable Rack Press – Times Literary Supplement
I have come to hope that a Rack Press pamphlet may be a tiny gift-box of unusually good poems – Alison Brackenbury, PN Review
Rack Press has the courage to be brief and elegant – The Rialto

Rack pamphlets have been wide-ranging in style and content with poetic quality the only publishing criterion but over the years poetry that engages boldly with the contemporary world (including lively political satire) has won most favour. Rack is also known for providing opportunities for late-emerging poets as well as young voices.

In addition to the characteristic finely-produced pamphlets – on laid paper in its trademark grey card covers – Rack has published full-length books of poetry such as William Palmer’s The Water Steps and in 2015 launched a series of small polemical prose books, Rack Press Editions, which included

Silly Lady Novelists? by Michèle Roberts, a lively and polemical response to George Eliot’s famous Westminster Review essay of 1856 “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”, in which she offered a challenging examination of current debates around fiction and sex.
Bloomsbury and the Poets by Nicholas Murray, a brief tour of the literary associations of the Bloomsbury district of London described by The Spectator as ‘a delight’
The Whitsun Wedding Video by Jeremy Noel-Tod, an essay on the state of British poetry, described as ‘a suavely witty and wise collection of essays’  by David Wheatley of The Poetry Foundation.

Small poetry pamphlet publishers, though seldom in receipt of grants or subsidies, boycotted by Amazon, and generally without significant sales and marketing resources, continue to thrive as part of the current poetry scene and Rack Press looks forward to another 15 years!


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Rack Poets Reading in Camden 21 January

Rack Poets William Palmer, Nicholas Murray, Michèle Roberts and Róisín Tierney are reading on 21st January 

as part of Ruth O’Callaghan’s  Lumen poetry series in Camden. 

This will be the first event of Rack’s 15th anniversary year and throughout the year we will be celebrating – with readings and events – the milestone of achieving fifteen years of publication and 50 poets published.

Join us on 

Tuesday 21st January 2020 

(doors open 6.30 for 7p.m.) 

LUMEN 

88 Tavistock Place 

WC1H 9RT

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POETS FROM THE FLOOR VERY WELCOME

Please leave the poem you read to be considered for the next anthology. Please note this is the final session before the poems for the anthology are selected.

£5/£4

Wine will be available to purchase on the night but can you please bring your own bottled water as there is no drinking water available at the venue.

All money raised goes towards cold weather shelters for the homeless