Worple Press

John Freeman

admin — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:16:54 +0000

John Freeman was born in Essex, grew up in south London and lived in Yorkshire before settling in Wales; he studied at Cambridge and has taught English Literature at Cardiff University since 1972, and from 1983, Creative Writing. Articles, essays and reviews in particular on Shelley, nineteenth century literature and modern poetry, have been widely published. A Suite for Summer is his ninth collection and his first since Landscape with Portraits in 1999.

SUITE FOR SUMMER - JOHN FREEMAN - OCTOBER 2007

admin — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:10:15 +0000

John Freeman is a master of the ‘plain style’ working in a poetic line that takes in Wordsworth and William Carlos Williams. In this fine new collection many discrete lyrics , sequences, prose poems and longer pieces such as “Archer and Acorn”, debate ‘ways of saying’, as in the opening sequence “Tabula Rasa” where simple diction and the working of speech rhythms over line units create for the reader ‘a spaciousness/ for us to stand up in and/ a resolved immediacy for us/ to enter into through calm contemplation, like a door/ into an inheritance we lost.’

“There is life in these poems and a life. John Freeman knows how to make the ordinary and everyday meaningful without resorting to fashionable tricks and clever turns of phrase. What happens is there to be thought about and turned into poems which, with their unobtrusive technique, draw the reader into them and into their life. It’s a rewarding experience.” Jim Burns

“His poetry re-awakens a sense of wonder in us… His way is to look very closely at nature and at human relationships. It’s the kind of attention Rilke recommended…” Kim Taplin

News from Worple Press

Amanda — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:00:56 +0000

Worple Press are currently editing and upgrading this site please bear with us and come back soon to view our new selection of titles

TO BE IN THE SAME WORLD PETER KANE DUFAULT December 2007

admin — Wed, 09 May 2007 14:41:47 +0000

This new collection from Dufault confirms him as one of the greatest living American poets and in particular one of the finest commentators on the natural world; his poetry is able to snatch ‘those uncatchable moments’ as Ted Hughes put it. There is a stark divide between the book’s two sections: the first part ponders the place of man in the natural world via finely-crafted narratives and poems of memory; the second contains some blistering and wry political satire with Dufualt’s principal targets American domestic and foreign policy over recent years.

WARP AND WEFT AN ANTHOLOGY OF WORPLE WRITING December 2007

admin — Wed, 09 May 2007 14:32:12 +0000

This first anthology of Worple poetry is edited by Peter Carpenter with a Foreword by Kevin Jackson; it gathers together poems written by established Worple authors and others whose work has come to the press’s attention via submission.

In all there are contributions from 25 writers including Jonathan Attrill, Anne Fitzgerald, John Freeman, Jeremy Hooker, Ann Leahy, Paul McCloughlin, Nessa O’Mahoney and Hugh Underhill, all new to Worple. Established names include Andy Brown, Peter Kane Dufault, David Morley, Peter Robinson and Iain Sinclair.

All the work is uncollected and it will give a very good snapshot of how far Worple has come since 1997 and where it is heading over the next few years.

BURIED AT SEA IAIN SINCLAIR MARCH 2007

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:47:01 +0000

Blake, summoning Milton to Felpham’s Vale, envisioned ‘Realms/ Of terror & mild moony lustre in soft sexual delusions’. Starlight on an ancient ditch, the English Channel. A new place humours a shify glaze. Eyes bruised by life in the city watch the waves. News from elsewhere is too loud, in the drag of shingle, the wind. Learning to let go, let rip. Walking out. Re-remembering: Walter Sickert in Dieppe, Patrick Hamilton in Hastings. Aleister Crowley. Bram Stoker waving his stick at the sea. The Conrad gang, early-modernist solitaries, keeping their heads down. Things that don’t happen here are here all the same. Slowly urgent. ‘It’s a lot of things,’ she said, ‘but it isn’t poetry.’

Any writing by Iain Sinclair, one of our greatest modern writers, is bound to provoke and intrigue. Sinclair’s new book of poetry is as vivid and original in its take on language and place as his track record would suggest. The presence of the sea and the human leavings (memorial, elegiac, twisted and other) at its edge, dominate the book. Highlights include sequences entitled ‘Patrick Hamilton’ and ‘Blair’s Grave’. Multiple points of view and garnished obliquities make this an irreverent, scholarly, bizarre, spookily de-familiarising and utterly engrossing read — a must for the legions of Sinclair devotees from the days of ‘Lud Heat’ onwards.

‘Not even the Thousand Handed Giant could easily turn over all the poems and open half of the portals of intelligence in this book… It is one of the cliffs of Blake’s and Coleridge’s Albion sweeping against the walls of Everywhere.’
Michael McClure (on The Firewall)

‘A broken sequence of breathtakingly lovely modern free-verse lyrics.’
Jenny Turner (on Lud Heat)

‘Sinclair is an authentic visionary. Only at the end of the book, however, do we realise we’ve also been in the power of a genuine wizard, someone capable of tracing patterns and designs only barely perceptible to most people and, more to the point, able to reveal them to us.’
Michael Moorcock

Elizabeth Cook

admin — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 21:57:20 +0000

was born in Gibraltar in 1952, spent her childhood in Nigeria and Dorset, and now lives in East London. She is the editor of the Oxford Authors John Keatsand author of Achilles (Methuen and Picador USA), a work of fiction acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Her poetry, short fiction and critical reviews have appeared in many journals including Agenda, The London Review of Books, Poetry London, Standand Tears in the Fence. She was a Hawthornden fellow in 2003 and has recently written the libretto for Francis Grier’s The Passion of Jesus of Nazareth, jointly commissioned by Vocal Essence in Minneapolis and the BBC.

Iain Sinclair

admin — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 21:56:28 +0000

is now firmly established as one of the most dazzlingly gifted and important of contemporary British writers. His work encompasses poetry, Lud Heat, fiction, Radon Daughters, Landor.s Tower, and documentary prose, including his best-selling Lights Out For the Territory and his most recent M25 epic London Orbital.

Clive Wilmer

admin — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 21:54:41 +0000

was born in 1945, grew up in London and studied at Cambridge where he still lives and teaches. Four collections of his poetry have been published by Carcanet Press. A freelance writer and lecturer, he has co-translated the Hungarian poets György Petri and Miklós Radnóti, edited prose works by Thom Gunn and Donald Davie and anthologised the writings of John Ruskin,William Morris and D.G. Rossetti. His critical writings appear in several periodicals, notably the TLS and PN Review. Other publications include Cambridge Observed: An Anthologyand Poets Talking, a collection of BBC interviews with contemporary poets.

Andy Brown

admin — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 21:53:34 +0000

is Lecturer in Creative Writing and Arts at the University of Exeter, and Centre Director for the Arvon Foundation at Totleigh Barton in Devon. He is the author of two collections, The Wanderer’s Prayer (Arc) and West of Yesterday (Stride), and two pamphlets of poetry; From a Cliff is to be published by Arc in 2002. He edited the highly praised Binary Mythsand Binary Myths 2(Stride) and is the founding editor of Maquette Press.