“Politics, power and poetry”

Patrician Press was set up at the end of 2012. Our aim, as Virginia Woolf said of the Hogarth Press, is: “TO PRODUCE WRITING OF MERIT WHICH THE ORDINARY PUBLISHER REFUSES.”

One of the first books published as an e-book edition, was The Unfettered Cube by Mark Brayley. This is a long poem based on a mathematical formula influenced by OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle). At different times, Mark and I had studied OULIPO with Philip Terry on our MA course in Creative Writing at the University of Essex.

We have now published three of Mark’s poetry books in print and e-book editions. The other two titles are: Disarming the Porcupine (2013) and Stance (2016)

Other poets we have published include:

Philip Terry Three Wishes (2013)

Sara Elena Rossetti  Arcobaleno Rainbow – a dual Italian and English language edition  (2013)

Martin Johnson Robert Macfarlane’s Orphans (2016)

Andrea Inglese  Letters to the Cultural Rehabilitation of the Unemployed (2017) – English edition translated from original Italian.

We are also in the process of publishing a series of anthologies including poems and short stories. The first, entitled Refugees and Peacekeepers, was published in March this year.

Patrician Press authors, Anna Vaught, Mark Brayley and Suzy Norman, contributed poems to this anthology.

The second anthology, My Europe, will be published next spring. We are delighted that George Szirtes is contributing a poem.

And we are planning a third, Tempest, edited by Anna Vaught, for 2019.

As Dylan Thomas said in his poem, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’,

Do not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light…

Some of my favourite poetry books are:

Poetry of the Thirties (Penguin Classics, 2000)

B. Yeats Poems selected by Seamus Healey (Faber & Faber, 2009)

Stevie Smith Not Waving but Drowning  (Deutsch, 1957)

Alan Brownjohn Woman Reading Aloud (Sycamore Press, 1969)

Suzy Norman’s choice:

Clive James – Injury Time (Picador, 2017)

Roger McGough – Collected Poems (Penguin, 2004)

Rebecca O’Connor – We’ll Sing Blackbird (Moth Editions, 2012)

Martin Johnson’s choice:

Moses Harris and his Scarlet Admirable by Rodney Pybus in Flying Blues (Carcanet, 1995)

Ian Duhig The Bradford Count (Bloodaxe, 1991)

Elizabeth Jennings Collected Poems 1953-85 (Carcanet, 1986)

Anna Vaught’s choice:

Tony Harrison Collected Poems (Penguin, 2016)

Patrick Kavanagh Collected Poems (Penguin, 2005)

Collected Poems And Plays Of Rabindranath Tagore (Macmillan, 1936)

Anna wrote a piece on poetry in the Writers and Artists Handbook here:

https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/writers/advice/971/dedicated-genre-advice/writing-poetry/