Special Offer of Signed Pamphlets

Special Offer: all four 2022 pamphlets in a pack each title individually signed and numbered by the author only £15 instead of £20

Order here now

New Titles (available to purchase here now) Launched in London on 3 October

 

New Titles for 2022 - Available to order now

We are pleased to announce four new Rack Press titles for September 2022 marking our return to post-Covid normality. They can be ordered now from this site post free using the Paypal buttons in the side column or from any bookshop.

The exciting line-up is:

Exposed Staircase by Will Eaves

Grief Dialogue by Eve Grubin

Shreds and Patches by David Ricks

A Conversation with George Seferis by Michael Vince

Will Eaves is a novelist, poet and musician. He has been Arts Editor of the TLS (1997–2011) and Associate Professor in the English department at the University of Warwick. In 2020, his novel Murmur won the Wellcome Book Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Fiction.

“Poetry is a pleaching of language into its most original, convincing and economic shape. Will Eaves has such technical magic at every moment in this collection. Whether semi-concealed narrative, allegorical landscape or literary annotation, each poem in Sound Houses is a pleasure and a satisfaction to encounter.” – Peter Porter on Sound Houses (2011

Eve Grubin’s previous collections are 

Morning Prayer (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005), and 

The House of Our First Loving (Rack Press, 2016)

“Her poems hold a deep and unusual charm….The House of Our First Loving left this reader longing for more light-filled, surprising work” – Alison Brackenbury in PN Review.

Ivan Juritz Prize judge, Will Eaves, has written of Grubin's work: 

“These are tender imagistic poems that owe an avowed debt to Emily Dickinson but which also, and more unusually, marry intimate observation with an interest in Jewish heritage and scriptural authority.”

David Ricks taught at King’s College London for more than thirty years and has written on most of the modern Greek poets who matter. His poems have appeared in a range of magazines including Poetry and New England Review. 

This is his first collection.

Michael Vince taught in Italy and the UK before emigrating to Greece in 1977 where he worked in language teaching. Previous collections include:  The Orchard Well (Carcanet, 1978) Mountain, Epic and Dream, (Hunting Raven, 1981) In The New District (Carcanet, 1982) Gaining Definition (R L Barth, 1986) Plain Text, (Mica Press, 2015) and Long Distance (Mica Press, 2020) 

Michael Vince writes: “This is a sequence interrupted, which has a postscript. It is a conversation with the poems of Seferis, rather than with the poet himself, who died in 1971. The poems are as much about me as about him.   It was written in 1992 when I was still living in Greece. The postscript occurs during a visit to Skyros, by which time I had returned to live in London.”

Some of the titles are taken from poems by Seferis, some poems refer to or invent parts of his experience, or refer to his poems – particularly to the sequence Mythistorema, and the poem Thrush. The poems are not what Seferis would have called “a contribution to criticism”. 

Closed now for submissions

Thank you to all those who submitted work for consideration since we re-opened on 1 March. We are sorry to have disappointed so many of you but, as we warned, space was very limited and the pandemic set us back considerably. 

We will announce again when we are next open for submissions and watch this space for an announcement of the new titles for autumn 2022 when they are ready.

Rack is Back!

We are very pleased to announce that Rack Press has finally emerged from its two-year Covid-induced sleep and will be re-opening on 1 March which is St David’s Day here in Wales – the national day of Wales. We have also changed our address – still in the heart of Radnorshire – to The Old Manse, Broad Street, Presteigne, Powys LD8 2AD, six miles from our previous base.  All other electronic contacts remain the same.

The story so far is that back in March 2020 we were forced to cancel at the last minute because of imminent lockdown the launch of four new pamphlets: Field Trips in the Anthropocene by A.C.Bevan, 24 Hours by Stephen Capus, A Dovetail of Breath by Fiona Larkin, and the bilingual Dy Galon Ofalus/Your Careful Heart by Elinor Wyn Reynolds. This was an excellent quartet of titles and we are pleased to say that copies of all of them are still available and can be ordered directly here.

Unfortunately, we were also forced to cancel all our planned 15th birthday celebratory events including a reading with live music at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre. We would have been marking 15 years of independent publication of 50 poets. 

We are very grateful, however, to The Poetry Pharmacy who invited some of our Wales and Marches poets to read in November, our only public event since lockdown and a great success.

Because small presses like ours, without any grants or subsidies, or extensive sales and marketing resources, depend on events and readings to sell what we publish, we took the decision to defer our annual launches of new titles until readings were once again a possibility. Fortunately, we had two other titles in the pipeline and these appeared in December 2020 (A Quartet in Winter by Nicholas Murray: still available) and March 2021(Homeland: Eighteen Bitter Songs (Yannis Ritsos) by David Harsent which is now sold out).

This means that our “closed for submissions” sign on the door has been turned back to “open" but we must stress that capacity this year is extremely limited as we have some work already in the pipeline. If you are considering submitting please read our guidelines VERY carefully. We regret that we do not have the resources to comment on work or offer anything other than a simple Yes or No but at least we promise to do our best not to keep you waiting any longer than is necessary.

Our plan, if possible, is to launch our new 2022 titles later in the year and this will be announced when they are ready.

In the meantime we would be very grateful if you chose to order some of our titles from this site now, some of which you will see are on special offer.

Thank you

Nick and Sue Murray

Rack Press