WELCOME
TO
ROCKINGHAM PRESS
WHAT'S NEW?
•
OUR FIVE EXCITING NEW POETRY COLLECTIONS
-- by
Mary Bourne, Danielle Hope, Lotte Kramer,
William Oxley and
Seán Street. Available now --
see below.
•
A NEW HERTFORDSHIRE HISTORY BOOK
-- Beating about
the Bush: a History of Hertford Heath
by Pam Kimpton. Available
now.
•
WARE POETS PROGRAMME OCTOBER 2009 - JANUARY
2010, AND PRIZE-WINNING POEMS IN THE WARE
POETS' ELEVENTH OPEN (judged by Pat Borthwick)
see
page 12.
EMAIL
ADDRESS -- rockpress@ntlworld.com
Details
of new and recent titles are on this page
and page 2. Poems from some of our recent
titles appear on pages 3, 4, 5 and 6. Non-poetry
titles are 7, 8 and 9. The remaining pages
are self-explanatory.
Use
the page titles above to navigate around
the site.
NEW
POETRY TITLES
Giraffe
under a Grey Sky is DANIELLE HOPE's fourth
collection of poetry and her first new volume
for over five years. In it we encounter a
new character – Mrs Uomo – who muddles through
modern urban society – dealing with health
care bureaucracy and the Hadron Collider,
then finds herself corrupted by a game of
monopoly. There are new poems delving social,
imaginative, natural and personal worlds –
in turns serious and comic – including the
workings of the heart, a world ruled by buttercups,
grief, and a sequence on the Potter’s Bar
rail crash. “Danielle Hope shares with William
Carlos Williams a gift for observation; with
Danielle Abse a lyricism and satirical edge;
and with Chehkov a compassion manifesting
itself in elegies and political poems borne
out of long acquaintance with suffering,"
wrote John O’Donoghue in Poetry Express. Danielle
Hope edited Zenos a magazine of British and
international poetry, was a trustee of Survivor’s
Poetry and is currently advisory editor of
Acumen. She was born in Lancashire, now lives
in London where she also works as a doctor.
ISBN
978-1-904851-34-9 -- Paperback, 64 pages,
£7.99
CLICK
HERE FOR POEMS FROM GIRAFFE UNDER A GREY
SKY
SEAN
STREET is a poet, broadcaster, writer and
academic. He continues to make feature programmes
for BBC Radios 3 and 4, has recently published
two ground-breaking histories of radio in
the UK and is Professor and Director of the
Centre for Broadcasting History Research at
Bournemouth University. He has also written
extensively for the theatre. His play, Honest
John based on the life of John Clare won the
1993 Central Television Drama Award for new
writing. Time Between Tides, his seventh
poetry collection, brings together new poems,
written since Radio and Other Poems
appeared in 1999, and his selection from six
previous books. The new poems embrace (not
always reverentially) travel, landscape, literary
history and film and include a sequence, entitled
The Broadcast based on CBC’s Fisheries Broadcast
– “possibly the longest-running program in
North American radio history”. “I found myself
reading The Broadcast as a realistic and moving
metaphor for the role language plays in the
world at large, and in particular for the
role poetic language can play in survival
...” Anne Cluysenaar, Scintilla. “The quiet
control remains, the perceptive sharpness
finds new layers.” John Powell Ward (author,
The English Line)
ISBN
978-1-904851-33-2 -- Paperback, 108 pages,
£7.99
CLICK
HERE FOR POEMS FROM TIME BETWEEN TIDES
LOTTE
KRAMER has been described as a “Holocaust
poet” and it is true that she writes feelingly
about the family and friends she left behind
when she came to Britain in 1939 in the Kindertransport.
But her canvas is much broader. She writes
about the landscapes of modern Europe, about
the Fen Country where she now lives and about
paintings and literature. Her sensitive treatment
of these subjects has been widely praised
by other poets and readers alike. Her poems
have appeared in many magazines and anthologies.
Turning the Key is her thirteenth book
– others include a bilingual volume published
in Germany, a selection of her poems about
the Kindertransport (published by the University
of Sussex) and a selection of her poems translated
into Japanese. There is also admiration among
reviewers for her ‘Versions and Translations’
of the great German poets – Rilke, Hölderlin,
Heine and Trakl. And there are many of her
fine translations in this present volume.
ISBN
978-1-904851-30-1 -- Paperback, 64 pages,
£7.99
CLICK
HERE FOR POEMS FROM TURNING THE KEY
WILLIAM
OXLEY is one of the most widely travelled
poets of our time, as well as one of the most
widely-published. His poetry has appeared
in The New York Times, The Spectator, The
Independent and The Observer, as
well as in innumerable other magazines and
journals. He has given readings of his work
in places as far removed as Nepal, Canada
and the South of France where his Poems
Antibes was launched in 2006. Sunlight
in a Champagne Glass gathers together
a selection of his poems since his collection
of London poems, London Visions, appeared
in 2005. William lives in Brixham, where he
was poet-in residence for Torbay as part of
the nation-wide Year of the Artist scheme
in 2000/1; and in 2008 he received the Torbay
ArtsBase award for literature. He has published
many books of poetry and is a critic and playwright.
He has lived and worked with many of the great
names of modern poetry and this volume celebrates
many of them with affection – Kathleen Raine,
Michael Donaghy, Ken Smith, Jon Silkin among
them.
ISBN
978-1-904851-29-5 -- Paperback, 112 pages,
£7.99
CLICK
HERE FOR POEMS FROM SUNLIGHT IN A CHAMPAGNE
GLASS
Nine
Lives and Counting is a stunning first
collection from a remarkable woman. "Stunning"
not only because Mary Bourne is a professional
artist as well as a poet, and this
144-page paperback includes 52 reproductions
of her paintings and Raku fired pots.
(One of these paintings is illustrated below.)
But "stunning" too because of the
quality of the poems -- and their range :
from celebrations of the artist's motivation
and methods, to poems about her childhood
on a farm (and about the 'birth mother' who
abandonned her) and
poems about lovers, monks, other friends,
spring in a Hertfordshire wood, the sands
of Norfolk and the cliffs of Cornwall -- and
Florence, Goa and Marrakech. But "stunning"
above all because of the honesty that Mary
brings to both poems and paintings. She has
that clear vision of what is true, down to
the smallest detail, and yet appropriate to
be expressed in either words or paint.
A
wonderful book -- a true work of art. CLICK
HERE FOR SOME OF MARY BOURNE'S POEMS
ISBN
978-1-904851-27-1 -- Paperback,
144 pages, £7.99
Mrs.
Valley's War
is a collection of utterly unique
stories -- amusing, sad, rather
riqué, surrealist, historical.
It is the first translation in
English of the "Shelter Stories"
of Feyyaz Kayacan
Fergar, written in London after
the VI flying bomb (or "doodle
bug") raids on South London.
Feyyaz was then a news translator
in the BBC Turkish Section, of
which he was later its head. He
sent the stories to a news magazine
in Istanbul and in 1963 they were
awarded the Turkish Language Academy
Prize. The critic Bedri Rahman
has written “I got hold of some
pictures of Henry Moore (the Shelter
Sketchbooks) and weighed them
against these stories (Mrs Valley’s
War) and the stories weighed heavier!”.
The translation by Ruth Christie
and Selçuk Berilgen has been assisted
by a grant from the TEDA Project
of the Turkish Ministry of Culture
and Tourism.
ISBN
978-1-904851-13-4 -- Paperback,
100 pages, £9.99
HISTORY
Still
availble and selling well is the history of
the publisher's old school, HIGHBURY COUNTY REVISITED by Brian Boyle,
edited by David Perman. Highbury now has its
own page on this website, with information
about the Old Highburians' Association, the
annual reunions in April of each year in London,
and two very nostaligic staff photographs.
CLICK HERE FOR HIGHBURY COUNTY ON PAGE14
ISBN
1-904851-01-0 Paperback 160pp £9.95
Hertford
Heath is a village of hidden treasures and
colourful characters and stories. Embracing
the ‘liberty’ of Little Amwell as well as
Haileybury College, the present village has
a Green which once contained ponds where local
women did their laundry, a splendid collection
of pubs and modern housing, cheek by jowl
with ancient woodland through which runs a
section of the Roman road, Ermine Street.
This book’s title, Beating
about the Bush, refers to the
Hertfordshire term, ‘bushes’, meaning sparsely
wooded heathland. Pam Kimpton knows the village
well – her mother’s family has lived there
for five generations. She has taken part herself
in most village activities and delights in
recalling the fêtes, festivals, fairs and
other celebrations of her time and times before.
She has also listened to the stories of young
and old, retrieved their photos and memories,
and pieced the whole together in a rich patchwork
of village life. Complete
with four pages of photos in colour.
ISBN
1-904851-25-7 Cased with colour jacket 184pp
£9.99
The
Artist and the Organist: The Luppinos of Hertford
and Ware tells the story of two
generations of the famous Luppino (or Lupino)
family, which later found fame on both stage
and screen. Thomas Frederick Luppino (1749-1845)
was a scene painter at Drury Lane and Covent
Garden and spent much time sketching views
of Hertford, Ware and the surrounding area
-- probably as material for his theatrical
scenery. His grandson, Thomas William Luppino
(1790-1859) was an accomplished musician and
organist of St. Mary's Church, Ware. This
fascinating book -- by theatre historican
Derek Forbes -- tells the story of their lives
and relationship as well as publishing for
the first time the hundred or so sketches
of Thomas Frederick Luppino (four of them
in full colour). This splendid book is supported
by grants from the Hertford & Ware Local History
Society, Hertford Town Council, the Ware Society
and Ware Town Council -- and is published
in memory of Adrienne Margaret Kirkby Forbes,
F.C.A. (1937-2005)
ISBN
1-904851-06-1 Cased with colour jacket 124pp
£9.95
ON
OTHER PAGES YOU WILL FIND ...
---
Poems from our anthologies in translation
of modern Turkish and Persian poetry -- both highly
recommended since there are few comparable
anthologies in print. And also some Jewish poetry.
----
Rockingham books about Hertfordshire history
as well as the books we distribute for Ware
Museum and the Ware Society -- see Hertfordshire History.
----
the complete list of Rockingham books in print
-- see Stocklist;
----
how to order Rockingham books -- see
How to Order;
----
the monthly programme of Ware Poets as well
as details of competitions -- see Ware
Poetry;
----
the new page of our publisher celebrating
Highbury County Grammar School 1923-67 --
Highbury.
---
Go to David Perman's personal page --- Page13.
OTHER POETRY SITES WE ARE GLAD TO RECOMMEND:
Rockingham Press is a member of Inpress Books, the distribution
and repping agency -- supporting small presses:
http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/
The
new website for Acumen: http://www.acumen-poetry.co.uk/
Site
last modified 5 October 2009
