Rack Press Poetry

2012-01-29T09:42:00.001Z

Four new Rack Press collections of poetry were launched in London on Thursday 26th January to an audience of nearly 80 people (seen here being addressed by Rack Press publisher, Nicholas Murray). The poets at the top table are, from left to right, Denise Saul, Michèle Roberts, Martina Evans and Dan Wyke.

You can order copies online here including the SPECIAL OFFER available until the end of February: a set of all four of the 2012 pamphlets each individually signed and numbered by the author for £15 (normal price £20)

Four Exciting New Collections Launched

2012-01-10T10:07:00.001Z

The 2012 series of Rack Press poets will be launched at a reading in London on 26th January and pamphlets are already available to order online here. This year we have four outstanding collections from established and newer names: Oh Bart by Martina Evans, The Heretic's Feast by Michèle Roberts, House of Blue, by Denise Saul, and Spring Journal by Dan Wyke.

The launch will take place on Thursday 26th January 2012 at the Marchmont Centre, 62 Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1AB. Doors open (free admission with refreshments) at 18.30 and readings will take place at 7pm.

Poets Gather in North London

2011-09-25T09:34:00.004+01:00

London's achingly trendy Exmouth Market was the scene of a highly successful poetry publishers fair on Saturday brilliantly organised by poet and publisher Charles Boyle of CB EDitions and Rack Press was one of the poetry publishers displaying their wares. There were readings throughout the day and here are four Rack Press poets, from left to right, Roísín Tierney, Katy Evans-Bush, Nicholas Murray and Christopher Reid.

Poetry Book Fair in London: Be There!

2011-09-17T11:36:00.003+01:00

Rack Press will be one of 23 small poetry presses taking part in a special poetry book fair in London this coming Saturday 24 September 2011 from 10 am to 5 pm and you are invited to come and meet us.

It takes place at Exmouth Market Centre, Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE and it will be opened by Michael Horovitz and entry is free and there are readings throughout the day. A programme will be available with new work by Simon Armitage and others. The 23 presses taking part are: Anvil, Arc, Carcanet, CB, Sidekick, Ward Wood, Waterloo, Waywiser, zimZalla editions, Donut, Egg Box, Enitharmon, flipped eye, HappenStance, if p then q, New Departures, Nine Arches, Penned in the Margins, Rack Press, Reality Street, Salt, Shearsman, Shoestring,

The book fair celebrates the variety and vitality of contemporary poetry and is a unique event. We look forward to seeing you.

Get Your Copies of "Airs and Ditties" Before Prom Premiere

2011-08-15T16:42:00.005+01:00

There are still some copies left of Christopher Reid's Airs and Ditties of No Man's Land the poem whose setting by Colin Matthews received its world premiere at the BBC Proms on Sunday 21 August.

Just click on this page to order online. Please remember to add an additional £1 if you are an overseas customer.

Ian Parks at Leeds Poetry Festival

2011-08-03T18:07:00.002+01:00

Rack Press poet, Ian Parks ("A Paston Letter") is reading at the first Leeds Poetry Festival on 24th September and also giving a talk that day on the love poetry of Robert Graves.

Ian's new collection The Exile's House is due from Waterloo Press later this year and he is currently editing an anthology of contemporary Yorkshire poetry A Version of the North for Five Leaves.

Katy Evans-Bush Reading at Swansea

2011-07-13T16:13:00.003+01:00

Rack Press poet Katy Evans-Bush whose pamphlet, Oscar & Henry is almost sold out, is reading on 28th July at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea from her new Salt collection, Egg-Painting Explained so get along there, folks.

To quote the Poetry Library: "A double-header to celebrate Tamar Yoseloff and Katy Evans-Bush's new books from Salt. Yoseloff's fourth collection, The City with Horns, features a sequence of poems inspired by Jackson Pollock. She holds degrees in Creative Writing from the University of Glamorgan and Aberystwyth University. Evans-Bush is a Welsh-American poet, blogger and communications specialist, who'll be reading from her second full collection, Egg Printing Explained."

To book tickets ring the Dylan Thomas Centre

on 01792 463980

Full Price £4 Concessions £2-80

Swansea PTL £1-60.

Dylanthomas.lit@swansea.gov.uk

www.dylanthomas.com

Get Real! Gets the Dramatic Treatment

2011-06-08T09:15:00.003+01:00

Actors from the Iris Theatre Company, directed by Daniel Winder, will be performing an evening of new dramatic verse tomorrow night (9th June) in the open air at St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, concluding with a performance by the company’s actors Ben Crystal and Matthew Mellalieu of Nicholas Murray’s verse broadside, Get Real! published as a pamphlet by Rack Press earlier this year.

“Political poetry, particularly the art of poetic pamphleteering, was once a staple of English literary and political life,” Nicholas Murray said this week. “But in this country there has been a tendency to think poetry and politics exist in separate spheres which would be a surprise to Milton, Marvell, Yeats or more recently Tony Harrison – not to mention a range of major twentieth century European poets. It’s time for poets to engage once again with the rough and tumble of politics.”

Nicholas Murray’s Get Real!, has already attracted praise from the Times Literary Supplement for its skilful verse technique, and it is a pamphlet-length poem written in regular rhyming stanzas reminiscent of the the famous verse letters of Robert Burns, a form revived in the 1970s by poets John Fuller, James Fenton and Clive James.

The hard-hitting broadside attacks the coalition’s politics and in particular lampoons the failed Liberal Democrat opposition to student tuition fees.

Since Get Real! appeared in February this year the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has also broken with the polite consensus by publishing in May her poem attacking the cuts to the Poetry Book Society, providing further evidence of the new willingness of poets to engage directly with contemporary politics.

World Première of Christopher Reid/Colin Matthews Collaboration

2011-04-15T10:16:00.003+01:00

This year's BBC Prom's season programme has just been announced and Rack Press is very pleased to announce that the Prom on Sunday 21st August will feature the world première of Colin Matthews' "No Man's Land", a twenty minute piece based on Christopher Reid's poetry pamphlet, Airs and Ditties of No Man's Land, published by Rack Press in February.

The pamphlet can be ordered directly from us or it can be bought at the London Review Bookshop in London.

Defend the Poetry Book Society

2011-04-12T08:18:00.002+01:00

Rack Press was one of 39 British poetry publishers who signed a letter to the Arts Council of England protesting against the total withdrawal of funding from this excellent body. Short-sighted, questionable and partial, the decisions of the ACE are not in the interests of the arts in this country.

New Rack Press Poets of 2011 Launched in London

2011-03-01T07:55:00.000Z

Over 80 people packed into the Marchmont Centre in Bloomsbury for the launch on 22nd February of pamphlets by the four Rack Press poets of 2011: Angela Topping, Roísín Tierney, Christopher Reid and Nicholas Murray. With readings, wine and conviviality it was a very pleasant evening and the poets are selling well. There are still a few sets of all four signed by the authors at a special launch price of £12 so order right away 'to avoid disappointment'.

Rack Press Poets Launched in Bloomsbury

2011-02-19T11:56:00.004Z

The four Rack Press poetry pamphlets of 2011 are being launched in London on Tuesday 22nd at 18.30 at the Marchmont Centre in Bloomsbury (62 Marchmont Street, London WC1). This will be an occasion to hear all four poets, Christopher Reid, Roísín Tierney, Angela Topping, and Nicholas Murray reading from their work. There will be refreshments, pamphlets on sale, and a party atmosphere so cut along and hear some of the best.

Full details of the titles and how to order them are available elsewhere on this blog.

Get Real Gets the TLS Scrutiny

2011-02-10T09:05:00.005Z

The second of the four new Rack Press pamphlets for 2011, Get Real!, by Nicholas Murray, a scathing verse broadside against the coalition Government, is mentioned in today's Times Literary Supplement where the diarist "J.C." confesses that: "So skilfully does he weave his argument through the aabcccb arrangement that it is difficult to quote effectively: the first four stanzas comprise a single sentence, for example."

In spite of the difficulty, however, he manages to quote some lines and this notoriously stringent, if not acerbic, critic, seems, we think, to like it. If you want to read the whole thing a remedy is at hand: send £4 to Rack Press, The Rack, Kinnerton, Presteigne, Powys LD8 2PF (p&p free). In London you can buy it over the counter at the London Review Bookshop or Bookmarks in Bloomsbury Street.

Rack Press Poets on the March

2011-02-09T11:42:00.002Z

Over at the excellent blog of poet Katy Evans-Bush is a nice, and characteristically well-informed description of our new offerings for 2011. We were pleased to publish Katy's Oscar & Henry last year and we hope she likes the new batch. See previous post for how to order.

New Titles for 2011 to be Launched in London

2011-01-26T17:15:00.004Z

Four characteristically rich and varied pamphlet collections from Rack Press are launched in London on 22nd February:

Airs and Ditties of No Man’s Land by Christopher Reid

Dream Endings by Roísín Tierney

Catching On: An Elegiac Sequence for Matt Simpson by Angela Topping

Get Real! by Nicholas Murray

To order simply send a cheque for £4 per pamphlet made payable to Rack Press (postage and packing free) to Rack Press, The Rack, Kinnerton, Presteigne, Powys LD8 2PF.

Four New Titles for 2011

2011-01-10T12:59:00.001Z

Four new pamphlet titles from Rack Press will be launched next month and will be announced shortly.

Watch this space!

Rack Press Poets Read in Wales

2010-09-06T08:04:00.004+01:00

Six Rack Press poets read in a special Fifth Birthday event at the Presteigne Festival in Wales on 29th August to a packed hall. Seen here holding the commemorative tile handmade by a local Welsh pottery to celebrate five years of poetry publishing, with which each poet was presented, are, from left to right, Byron Beynon, Steve Griffiths, Nicholas Murray, Ian Parks, Cathy Galvin and William Palmer.

Presteigne Festival Hosts Fifth Birthday Poetry Event

2010-08-20T14:22:00.002+01:00

We are delighted to have been invited to host a poetry reading and book launch as part of the 2010 Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts in the Welsh Marches on Sunday 29th August. Many of the sixteen poets published by Rack Press since 2005 will be coming to read and entrance is free. See us on our home patch in Wales!

http://www.presteignefestival.com/event/The_Rack_Press_Poets/15

Latest Reviews

2010-08-03T10:08:00.002+01:00

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.

Praise for Katy Evans-Bush

2010-06-29T13:14:00.002+01:00

The Times Literary Supplement dated 25th June has a group review of new poetry pamphlets and it praises one of the four Rack Press titles published in January, Oscar & Henry, by Katy Evans-Bush. The reviewer, Andrew McCulloch, calls this an "impressive sequence" (we agree) and celebrates the "wit and playfulness of this collection".

You can order an immediate copy by sending an order to the address on the side panel at the right here. Try some of the other titles too!

Welsh Launch at Presteigne Festival

2010-06-22T09:40:00.005+01:00

The Rack Press poets, including this year's authors, will be appearing at a special event at the Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts in August. As well as being the home turf of the Rack Press, Presteigne in Powys in Mid Wales is the location for the renowned Presteigne Festival which is one of the highlights of the British musical calendar and we are very proud to be there.

We have also been reviewed in the most recent issue of the Bow Wow Shop so check it out.

Rack Press Website

2010-05-06T17:52:00.003+01:00

The former Rack Press website no longer exists and this blog-based website is where you should go to find out about our news and titles and how to order. Enjoy our poems!

Amazon: A Warning

2010-02-19T08:59:00.002Z

I very much regret the fact that Amazon orders are currently being met with an automated reply saying Rack Press titles are "Temporarily Out of Stock" which is nonsense. I am currently trying to deal with this automated behemoth to convey that information to them. In the meantime please order direct from Rack Press, The Rack, Kinnerton, Presteigne Powys LD8 2PF where orders will be despatched immediately.

Nicholas Murray

Publisher

Rack Press

Party goes off with a swing

2010-01-19T14:28:00.003Z

The Rack Press poetry launch at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury was a great success and well-attended and our 5th birthday was celebrated in style. Below are some of the guests, left to right, Alan Jenkins, deputy editor and poetry editor of The Times Literary Supplement, Rack Press founder, Nicholas Murray, and poet and critic Alan Brownjohn. Order now!

New Titles Launched in London Next Week

2010-01-06T08:44:00.002Z

The new titles described in the post below are launched next week, Thursday 14th January, at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury at 6.30pm and all are welcome.

Look at our new website for all the details of the new poets.

And don't worry about the snow. We had it last week (as you can see from the photograph) at Rack Press HQ in the Welsh Marches and we survived.

Four New Poets in Exciting Line-Up for 2010

2009-12-14T08:55:00.009Z

Four new titles from Rack Press Poetry are being launched on Thursday 14th January in London at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury at 6.30pm. More details to follow.

The Press will be celebrating the 5th birthday of its relaunch in 2005, since which date sixteen poets have appeared in the characteristic Rack Press grey livery in finely produced limited editions.

The new year's poets are Katy Evans-Bush with Oscar & Henry, David Kennedy with Mistral, Philip Morre with Here's to the Home Country, and Ian Parks with A Paston Letter.

All pamphlets are priced at £4 and can be pre-ordered now direct (postage free) from:-

Rack Press, The Rack, Kinnerton, Presteigne, Powys LD8 2PF.

Cheques payable to Rack Press.

Date of Publication: 14 January 2010

ALL RACK PRESS TITLES ARE AVAILABLE IN LONDON FROM JOHN SANDOE BOOKS, 10 BLACKLANDS TERRACE, CHELSEA

The View from Rack Press Corporate HQ

2009-10-27T14:32:00.002Z

We are having a London launch in January but Rack Press is a Welsh press based in the beautiful Radnor Valley in the Welsh Marches.

This was the view on the last day of British Summertime.

The New Rack Poets Are Coming

2009-10-22T14:04:00.002+01:00

We will soon be announcing the poets in the new 2010 series to be launched in January. Because this is to be the fifth birthday of the relaunched Rack press there will be more poets, a special London launch, and lots of special offers so watch this space!

We are also redesigning our website which we hope will be active in a few weeks.

Poetry Wales Salutes Us

2009-09-04T10:13:00.004+01:00

Thank you to Poetry Wales for a nice mention of Rack Press in its latest issue (Spring 44 (4)) in the context of a discussion of the current fashion for poetry pamphlets. In a sense it is a mixed blessing from big poetry publishers like Seren and Faber who have both announced new pamphlet initiatives in the past year, because we look to them for a more substantial commitment to new poetry in book form. But every little helps.

Poetry Wales writes: "In Wales, Powys-based Rack Press has established a well-produced series frequently reviewed in this magazine..." Not strictly accurate because Poetry Wales consistently ignored us until a splendidly generous review last autumn of the third annual batch of poets appeared there. Getting anything reviewed these days in the poetry magazines is a struggle so we are grateful for all these notices.

While on the subject of pamphlets we recommend the following:

Towards a Pamphlet: a practical course

Tutor: Roddy Lumsden

Venue: Poetry School, 81 Lambeth Walk, London SE11 6DX

Day / Time: Fridays, 6.45-8.45pm

Duration: 6 weeks

Start Date: 6 November

Price: £65 (£46 concs)

You’ll look at how to put together, order and edit a pamphlet of poems; considering publication options, range, theme, the editorial and selection processes, design, layout and fonts. This short course, aimed at advanced poets who feel their work is now strong and original enough to be successful in a busy market, is taught by a poet who has edited many pamphlets

as well as writing both pamphlets and full collections of his own.

To book: call 0207 582 1679 or book online at www.poetryschool.com

New reviews of Rack Press pamphlets

2009-07-30T08:22:00.003+01:00

The latest issue of Planet magazine carries reviews by Lyndon Davies of the 2009 series of Rack Press pamphlets. He praises John Powell Ward's "witty and inventive sequence" Variations on Four Places, finds Siobhán Campbell's language in Darwin Among the Machines "revels in the lexicon of mechanical paraphernalia" and describes William Palmer's poems in An Instruction from Madame S. as "elegantly wrought and mellifluously gratifying to the ear".

Issue 195 of Planet is available from www.planetmagazine.org.uk

The current issue of Agenda, a Welsh issue, also reviews Rack Press pamphlets under the slightly disconcerting heading of "Omnium Gatherum of Welsh Books". John Powell Ward's sequence is praised again and there are reviews of Steve Griffith's Landing and Byron Beynon's Cuffs.

Agenda is available from www.agendapoetry.co.uk.

Rack Press at Hay Festival of Literature

2009-05-25T09:19:00.003+01:00

Rack Press pamphlets and poem cards will be available during the three day Hay Poetry Festival 28-30th May, a fringe event to the main Hay Festival, taking place at Oriel Gallery, Salem Chapel, Bell Bank, Hay on Wye with a range of poets appearing including Peter Finch, Wendy Mulford, John James, Chris Torrance and David Greenslade.

Information from goodbard@yahoo.co.uk

Rack Press Poem Cards on Sale

2009-04-13T10:34:00.002+01:00

This year's new venture from Rack Press, Poem Card No 1, an attractively produced folding card that can be used as a greetings card (see illustration to the right) is now available at two Welsh outlets, The Rowan Tree in Presteigne, Powys and Pemberton's in Hay-on-Wye, also in Powys (all ready for the imminent influx of the metropolitan literati at next month's Guardian Hay Festival of Literature).

The card consists of a reproduction of a contemporary painting by Leeds-based artist, Elizabeth Neylan, Acapulco, together with a poem by Rack Press founder, Nicholas Murray in response to the painting. This literary pairing of poem and painting is called ekphrasis.

Cards can also be ordered directly from Rack Press either individually at £1.65 (post free) or at a special discount of 8 cards for £10.

Latest Review Praises Byron Beynon

2009-03-20T11:33:00.002Z

The latest Rack Press review of Byron Beynon's pamphlet, Cuffs (2008) has appeared in the winter issue of The Seventh Quarry (No 9). The reviewer finds this: "A slim publication of excellent and successful poems. It is an individual and impressive voice that is threaded with focussed intelligence and maturity. A first class poet who really understands the importance of craft, and the emotional and intellectual weight of his chosen words." Deserved criticism of this fine collection, copies of which are still available.

Successful London Launch of Latest Pamphlets

2009-01-22T10:42:00.002Z

Left to right here at the London launch of the 2009 series of Rack Press poetry pamphlets on Wednesday 21st January at the endearingly old-fashioned and quirky Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury are: Siobhán Campbell, William Palmer, John Powell Ward, and publisher Nicholas Murray. A fine crowd turned out to hear all the poets read and the new "Rack Poem Cards" were unveiled, No 1 being a collaboration between Leeds-based artist Elizabeth Neylan and Nicholas Murray whose poem Acapulco was written in response to her painting of that title. The cards are available from Rack Press at £1.50 each or 8 for £10.

Three New Rack Poetry Pamphlets Launched

2008-12-18T16:42:00.002Z

Three new titles from Rack Press for 2009 are being launched in London on 21st January at an event at the Swedenborg Hall, Bloomsbury Way, London WC1 at 6.30-8.30. Readings and free glass of wine and free entry.

The titles are:-

Darwin Among the Machines
by Siobhán Campbell

Is the poem a machine made of words? Is nature on the side of the machines? Taking off from the steam shovel, this sequence pits the poetic impulse against its traditional enemies to see if they may have more in common than we think.

Siobhán Campbell’s publications include The Permanent Wave and The Cold that Burns (Blackstaff Press) and That water speaks in tongues (Templar Poetry). Her new collection, Cross-Talk, is forthcoming from Seren. An award-winner in the National, Troubadour and Wigtown competitions, she lives in London and lectures at Kingston University on the MFA in Creative Writing.

‘an outstanding ear for the music of language…. the rhymes and half-rhymes give the verse a rewarding sureness and slyness. Siobhán Campbell’s sense of cadenced disturbance marks her out as someone worth listening to with attention.’
Robert Crawford

‘Written with a cool eye and clear compassion, these poems are torpedoes lined with feather strokes… very luminous and steady-eyed.’
Bernard O’ Donoghue

An Instruction from Madame S.
by William Palmer

These are poems of place; how we change the rooms and landscapes in which we live, and how we are changed by them. Place is governed by season and weather, it is our home or an anonymous hotel, a city or wilderness.

William Palmer was brought up in Montgomeryshire in Wales and now lives in south-west London. He has written five acclaimed novels, a collection of short stories and a collection of poems, The Island Rescue (2007). He has published stories and poems in a wide range of magazines and journals in the UK and Ireland, including Critical Quarterly, London Magazine, The Literary Review, The Shop, Stand and Poetry Review. His work has also been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. He is a regular book reviewer for The Independent and The Literary Review.

‘There is a kindness in William Palmer’s poems: a generosity of perception, language and melody (read him aloud), but he is also generous in his poems’ precision and economy. William Palmer’s poetry never excludes readers but it does challenge them at the same time as it charms them. He is one of our most interesting poets, and his work in The Island Rescue is a complete delight.’
David Morley

Variations on Four Places
by John Powell Ward

This sequence in four movements explores the poet’s response to four areas of England and Wales – Gower, Radnor, Somerset andGloucestershire – that have particular personal resonance for a poet with a deep engagement with the Welsh and English spirit of place.

John Powell Ward was born in Suffolk and educated at the Universities of Toronto, Cambridge and Wales. He lectured at the University of Wales at Swansea for 25 years. He was editor of Poetry Wales from 1975 to 1980 and has written critical studies of R.S. Thomas and Worsdworth and was editor of Seren’s Borderlines series.

‘his writing arrives from a point where rational discourse and the liberating resources of the imagination merge’
Poetry Review

‘John Powell Ward is a poet who takes risks with language; his poems are densely packed, full of echoes and chains of linking sound.’
New Welsh Review

Each of these titles is
published in a limited edition of 150 copies, the first fifty of which are signed by the author. A set of three can be obtained at the special price of £10 until 31 January 2009.
To order send a cheque, payable to Rack Press, to
Rack Press, The Rack, Kinnerton, Presteigne, Powys LD8 2PF. Postage free.

More Reviews of Rack Press Titles

2008-10-24T10:55:00.003+01:00

It is good to see yet more positive reviews of the 2008 Rack Press titles. The latest issue of Poetry Wales reviews all three pamphlets by Byron Beynon, Steve Griffiths, and David Wheatley and the latest issue of Poetry London reviews David Wheatley's Lament for Ali Farka Touré, welcoming the way it begins "cheekily, lyrically, delightfully" and calling the pamphlet "an attractively produced limited edition".

Congratulations to Steve Griffiths, also, whose latest full length collection, An Elusive State: entering al-Chwm is just published by Cinnamon Press Rack Press is proud to have published earlier this year his collection Landing which broke a long silence and we understand there is even more to come!

Cinnamon describe the collection as follows:-

"A man hits fifty. He grew up surrounded by a belief in progress. Now he, and the world
around him, are not so sure. He creates a Utopia to comfort himself. Steve Griffiths's
cycle of poems, Al-Chwm, tells the story of the life and death of an imaginary utopia.
The cycle began with a vision in the province of Granada which merged a twilight in the
hill town of Montefrio with one in Griffiths's home village in Anglesey, North Wales, as
the lights came on one by one. Al-Chwm, first heard on Radio Three in 2006, is a
parallel universe, a magical epic, a comfort, a mystery."

Rack Press Goes to Venice

2008-10-07T09:53:00.003+01:00

Rack Press publisher Nicholas Murray will be reading from his own 2006 collection, The Narrators and from new work at

Old World Books
Al Ponte del Gheto Vechio
Cannaregio 1190
30121 Venezia

On Monday 13th October at an event hosted by John Francis Phillimore of Old World Books. The event is open to all.

More Praise for Rack Poets

2008-10-07T09:49:00.001+01:00

The leading Welsh magazine Planet recently reviewed all three Rack Press 2008 titles and there was praise for all the poets.

High Praise for David Wheatley

2008-07-17T08:27:00.002+01:00

Writing in the current issue of the Dublin Review of Books, Maria Johnston, in a long evaluative essay on his work, singles out David Wheatley's 2008 Rack Press pamphlet, Lament for Ali Farka Touré, for especial praise:

"Wheatley’s most recent publication, his dazzlingly evocative Lament for Ali Farka Touré, was published by Rack Press in 2008 in a limited edition and it is his most innovative and imaginative publication to date. There is something appropriate about its small-scale publication as a single poem. That it was not made part of a larger collection lends the work a poignant integrity and sets it apart. In this lament for the famous and world-renowned “king of African blues”, Wheatley brings us on a journey through the heartland of Mali, Ali Farka Touré’s landscape, the landscape that is the source of the music itself, as Touré himself made clear in an interview: “Mali is first and foremost a library of the history of African music. It is also the sharing of history, legend, biography of Africa – that’s Mali.” Touré’s final album, Savane, was released posthumously and Wheatley quotes lines from the opening track, “Erdi”,in the penultimate stanza of his poem as a tribute to the never-ending gift of Touré’s music: “First son who has never been matched, thank you for what never ends, yes!” Indeed, Joe Tangari’s description of Savane as an album that “flows like a river, at times, tumultuous, at others placid, but always full of life and movement” and “conjures an elemental thrum” perfectly encapsulates Wheatley’s own “Lament”. Wheatley clearly sought to capture the whole, vast panorama of the landscape of Touré’s music in his poem and the “Lament” opens by invoking the almost mythical creatures of Niger with a touching, and playfully childlike inquiry:

Hippo baby hippo
at the waterhole

where the crocodile’s
narrowed eyes stare

from the pool,
o thirsty hippo

what will you do?

“In my tongue Mali / means “hippo” and Bamako / “place of crocodiles”,” we later learn, and the variety of languages and expressive forms in Mali is emphasised throughout; Touré himself spoke eleven languages. As well as being a figure on the world music stage, best known perhaps for his famous collaboration with Ry Cooder, he was also mayor of his town of Niafunké, and so it is that his spirit embodies both the universal and the local, containing multitudes. Jean-Marie Gibbal, in his 1994 study Genii of the River Niger, writes that in Farka’s copious music “the conversation roams from the most modern sound recording techniques and the process of making a record with a multiple-track mixing board in some faraway European studio to the world of the river”. It is this world of the river that Wheatley is so attentive to, where we find, as Gibbal explains: “the crocodile who ‘only fights with his teeth’ and who’s so sad he could be mistaken for a shangtan; the hippopotamus, who is so heavy he ‘digs tombs’ as he moves over the solid earth”. Moreover, Farka, Touré’s given nickname, means “donkey” and Wheatley’s lament ends appropriately with a man whistling “a tune whose name / means happiness” and “slapping the rump / of the first donkey he passes”. Gibbal’s study provides insight into the significance of these creatures and Touré’s deep connection with the land and the river. As he explains, these animals are associated with the Ghimbala genii or djinn, the spirits of the place whose presence Touré sensed every day as he had been in communion with them from an early age. Touré himself described his heritage as a vital, creative source, “a well that never grows dry”. It was the spirits who led Touré to his music and Wheatley’s “Lament” recounts Touré’s initiation into music through the spirits while also portraying an invigorating, contemporary musical community:

When the child spies a snake
at the edge of the fields

the spirits attack.
Bind him, take him away!

“What is that tune
you are playing, djinn?”

Bassekou sings. “I am
a griot and you must tell me.”

“I call it Ba La Bolo,”
the djinn answers,

“The Branch of the River.”
For a year the boy and the spirits

do battle. He returns
with a tune on his lips:

all praise to Jimbala!
Ancestral and river spirits,

Pepsi and Sicilian-style spirits
join us this evening

where Bassekou sings
Ba La Bolo in Chez Thierry

and we dine on the best
pizza in Bamako.

In this way Touré is a child of the river – he has professed the importance of “roots”, of “home” – while also being a far-sighted, cosmopolitan figure. All is possible for Touré, as his music in its range and breadth of styles testifies to. As Gibbal has recognised, Touré manages in his repertoire to “synthesise the culture of the rock-music generation with the genii culture in which he was raised”. Wheatley’s poem captures something of the whole expansive weave, the richness and complexity of Touré’s landscape, its deep history, culture, languages, religions, mythology, all bound up in Touré’s music, giving a full sense of its very life and breath, its boundless reach. This is a reality, a whole world, that is far from the culture of Western Europe and so it deepens the readers’ understanding of the world and the processes of civilisation:

The Manding empire,
the Songhai empire.

Colonial wars, tribal wars.
Nomad uprisings,

desertification. Abandonment
of migration routes

and slaughter of livestock.

The reader becomes the traveller, journeying through the unknown and down the river Niger in a pirogue. The traveller’s assumptions and ideals are tested at every turn as new sights and sensations present themselves and other perspectives are revealed:

The river rises, sun-baked
and hardened, to give thanks

for itself in the mud
mosque sweating under

its ostrich-egg caps
and awaiting the women

to come sponge it down.
A goat’s capsized reflection

shakes a silent bell
under the tide that rocks

the pirogue. We bring
you millet and salt

from the outlying villages
and desert mines.

The world has opened up in this way, a “capsized reflection”. As the blues maestro himself said in an interview:

For some people, when you say Timbuktu it is like the end of the world, but that is not true. I am from Timbuktu and I can tell you we are right at the heart of the world.

“That sense of the genius loci, that phrase, of inhabiting the place, I get a very strong charge out of that I must say,” Wheatley has said, and in his “Lament for Ali Farka Touré” he has carried us to Timbuktu, down the Niger where Touré himself once steered his course, to a place that is both at the end of the world and right at its heart, a place that we didn’t even know truly existed as the quasi-mythical, far-off land of Timbuktu is the stuff of fantasy. August Kleinzahler has described Roy Fisher’s poem “The Thing About Joe Sullivan” as “one of the very few first-rate poems about jazz”. One thinks too of Larkin’s “For Sidney Bechet” as another deserving tribute. Wheatley, in his vibrant, moving paean to Touré’s spirit, has done the same for the African blues musician and there is a palpable warmth throughout this poem that has not been in evidence in Wheatley’s poetry thus far. There is a fresh imaginative engagement at work here and the sense of further possibility thereby seems limitless; it is a poetry that, as it develops and explores, opens up new and larger ways of encountering the world in all its multiplicity, and there’s more, much more, to come.

From the House of Literature

2008-04-13T09:23:00.002+01:00

A very successful launch of the 2008 series of Rack Press poets took place on Friday at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, also known as Ty Len or House of Literature in Welsh. The three poets, seen here from left to right Byron Beynon, David Wheatley, and Steve Griffiths read well to an appreciative audience. There are still copies left so please order now!

Wales Launch for Rack Poets in Swansea

2008-04-06T10:10:00.002+01:00

You are cordially invited to the launch at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea on Friday 11 April of the 2008 Rack Press pamphlet series. It will be a chance to meet the poets and hear them read and have a free glass of wine. Byron Beynon's Cuffs, Steve Griffiths' Landing and David Wheatley's Lament for Ali Farka Touré will be launched at the Centre at an event starting at 7pm. We look forward very much to seeing you there.
Contact: 01792 463980
www.dylanthomas.com
dylanthomas.lit@swansea.gov.uk

Hazel Frew and the Gawain Man

2008-03-20T14:29:00.003Z

Rack Press poet Hazel Frew read last week in Glasgow with Simon Armitage whose splendid translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has just come out in paperback. We were very pleased to see the product placement here and there are a few copies of Hazel's collection Clockwork Scorpion still available.

Latest News

2008-03-12T07:28:00.003Z

We are pleased to see a nice article in the Welsh national newspaper Western Mail online edition about Rack Press which describes us as a "quality press for perfect poetry" which is too kind. The latest two Welsh poets, Byron Beynon and Steve Griffiths are praised (by the way, chaps, the third poet in the new series, David Wheatley, may be Irish but it would have been nice to have included him). According to Peter Finch - Wales's one man poetical dynamo: "The poems sit mellow in perfect space."

Also congratulations to Steve Griffiths on launching his new website at www.stevegriffithspoet.com

Hazel Frew in Edinburgh

2008-02-11T16:03:00.000Z

Rack Press poet Hazel Frew (seen here at an earlier Rack Press party with another of our poets, Dai Vaughan) was reading in Edinburgh last night from her 2007 collection Clockwork Scorpion and attracted some excellent audience response and very favourable reviews from two Scottish poetry blogs. Click here and here to read them. Well done Hazel.

Hazel has also been asked to read with Simon Armitage at Glasgow University on the 13th March at 7.30pm in the Anatomy Theatre. She'll be the only other reader on the bill. The reading is being organised jointly by Vital Synz and the Creative Writing programme at Glasgow University.

Successful Launch of 2008 Series

2008-01-16T12:23:00.002Z

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.”

Excitement mounts....

2008-01-10T16:05:00.000Z

A good turn out is expected on Tuesday 15th January at the Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury at 6.30 for the launch of the new 2008 Rack Press poetry pamphlets (see details below). Admission is free and includes a free glass of wine and there will be the chance to meet the poets and buy signed copies of these beautifully produced limited edition pamphlets.

The Swedenborg Hall is in Bloomsbury Way, London nearest Underground Holborn or Tottenham Court Road and the entrance is in Carter Street down the right hand side of of the bookshop.

We look forward to seeing you there.

The New Poets Are Coming!

2007-12-17T17:30:00.001Z

Three new Rack Press poets are being launched in London on 15th January at the Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury at 6.30 (admission free with refreshments). Byron Beynon's Cuffs, Steve Griffiths' Landing and David Wheatley's Lament for Ali Farka Touré will be introduced and a further Welsh launch will take place on 11 April at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea.

Each pamphlet costs £4 and ordering instructions are in the panel here in the top right hand corner.

Everyone is welcome to the launch and if you would like to know more please visit the Rack Press website. I am sorry for some sort of gremlin on the site at the moment which has sent the layout all over the place when seen in Windows: this is being examined by our IT team.

Poetry London Praises Vaughan

2007-11-11T23:10:00.000Z

The latest issue of Poetry London has a nice review by Kate Bingham of Dai Vaughan's Rack Press pamphlet, Inconsequences which opens with the marvellous sentence:

"There is something magical about a poet's bottom drawer."

Actually, we are too refined at Rack Press to use words like "bottom" but we would tentatively argue that Dai's work is top drawer. Kate writes interestingly and enthusiastically about the collection and concludes: "Dai Vaughan is better known for his fiction, but the strength of this pamphlet suggests he should look again at anything he might have in that bottom drawer."

Look out also for the 2008 series of Rack Press pamphlets which are currently in preparation!

Rack Press Poets Flourish!

2007-10-07T22:22:00.000+01:00

We are so pleased that Hazel Frew, one of our 2007 poets, a few copies of whose pamphlet, Clockwork Scorpion, are still left, is to have a full length collection published next year by Shearsman. Highly recommended!

The Latest Sphinx

2007-10-07T22:17:00.000+01:00

The latest issue of Sphinx magazine, the unique publication from Scotland dedicated to pamphlet poetry (they use the word 'chapbook' which we like and are trying to persuade ourselves to adopt) has a brief reference to this blog for which we are grateful. Well worth subscribing to at www.happenstancepress.com.

The Elegance of Brevity

2007-09-03T14:58:00.000+01:00

Thank you to the excellent The Rialto magazine from Norwich for praising our latest three pamphlets for having "the courage to be brief and elegant". We think this is a compliment and we appreciate it.

Latest Reviews of Rack Press Poets

2007-08-14T10:47:00.000+01:00

The latest issue of the Welsh magazine Planet has reviews of each of the three 2007 Rack Press titles. The reviewer, Richard Poole, praises Dai Vaughan's Inconsequences for its "tautness of style" and concludes that his sequence consists of: "Strong, sharp-edged poems." He says that Peter Dale's collection of epigrams, Eight by Five, is "a dense book, with much to admire and think about, from poignant reflections on loved ones, to laconic takes on middle-age and religion, to aperçus on poetry...All in all, excellent value...." From Hazel Frew's collection Clockwork Scorpion the reviewer, calling the poet "an image-maker", picked out "Doing Time" as the most successful poem where "Two cooks work side by side, engrossed." See below for how to order these collections or visit the Rack Press website

Meet Some More of Our Poets

2007-08-08T08:52:00.000+01:00

In addition to Peter Dale (see post below) two other poets were published earlier this year by Rack Press. They are seen here at the London launch in January, Hazel Frew and Dai Vaughan. If you go to the Rack Press website you will see reviews of all the poets. Hazel's Clockwork Scorpion is a collection of delightfully original poems and Dai's Inconsequences is a collection by a writer perhaps better known for his highly innovative fiction and here showing another aspect of his talent. The well-attended launch in Bloomsbury is becoming something of an annual event and we hope to see you at the next one in January 2008. Full details will be posted here.

A New Valéry Translation by Peter Dale

2007-08-07T08:26:00.000+01:00

Peter Dale, one of Britain's foremost poet translators, and author of a Rack Press collection of epigrams, Eight by Five (2007), launches this month from Anvil Press his bilingual edition of Charms and other pieces by the French poet Paul Valéry. This is a collection of the work of one of the most important twentieth century French poets and has been in preparation for thirty years. As Anvil puts it of Dale's work: "As ever, he takes the hardest - and, for the reader, most rewarding - route in making versions with corresponding rhyme and metre. The result is a fresh view of an intriguing poet, somewhat neglected but now revived in English."

Peter Dale is the author of notable translations of Dante's Divine Comedy and selections from Tristan Corbière, Jules Laforgue and François Villon.

Charms is available from Anvil Press Poetry, Neptune House, 70 Royal Hill, London SE10 8RF at £11.95 post free.

Eight by Five is available from Rack Press Poetry, The Rack, Kinnerton, Presteigne, Powys LD8 2PF at £4 post free.

Rack Press Relaunched

2007-08-06T17:08:00.000+01:00

Welcome to the new blog of Rack Press which was re-launched in 2006 with three pamphlets, Lute Variations by Richard Price, The Green Buoy by John Barnie and The Narrators by Nicholas Murray. The following year, in January 2007, three more poets were published, Peter Dale with Eight by Five, Hazel Frew with Clockwork Scorpion and Dai Vaughan with Inconsequences.

Richard Price's pamphlet, Lute Variations was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement on 18th May 2007. Reviewer David Wheatley observed: "Price's fine versions are a model of collaborative intertextuality, each version blending suggestively with the next. Price is an inquisitive and versatile writer and...the chapbook form seems particularly congenial to him."

Please note that Lute Variations is now out of print

Hazel Frew's pamphlet Clockwork Scorpion is praised in the latest issue of Poetry Scotland as "very good work from a good newcomer. Recommended." It is also reviewed in the new issue of Sphinx where its highly original subject matter and imaginative dexterity is praised. "I like the control and economy in this writing," says reviewer Eleanor Livingstone, "and Frew's confidence with structure gives the poems a lot of liveliness."

Peter Dale's Eight by Five was reviewed by Sarah Crown in The Guardian on 24th March. She praised the collection's "mordant humour" finding the poems "pungent and amusing". In these "rich and textured poems...the humble epigram is elevated, illuminated; transformed".

Nicholas Murray, founder of Rack Press, is interviewed about the Press in the latest issue of Sphinx magazine (Issue 6, Spring 2007: www.happenstancepress.com)

If you would like to learn more visit the Rack Press website.