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.
