My assemblage from the Stations sequence, ‘Spring Lament’, is feature with two poems by Anne Berkeley and Caroline Carver
on the prose and poetry webzine, Ink, Sweat, and Tears.
The magazine, edited by poet and visual artist Helen Ivory, regularly features excellent poetry and prose by many of the countries leading writers.
This weekend I have had the pleasure of being the guest contributor on poet Kona Macphee’s blog ‘that elusive clarity’.
Click on this link to read the two features, ’six things’ and ‘Sunday best’.
They were great fun to do (more difficult than you would think) and really got the old grey matter workiing!
And if you can, please take some time to follow the link to Kona’s website, featuring her excellent work as a poet.
I would highly recommend her recent collection ‘Perfect Blue’.
David Cooke’s new collection IN THE DISTANCE is now available on Amazon.
Signed copies are now available. Follow this link to purchase your copy.
Watch a video of David reading his poem ‘A House In Mayo’ here.
I hope you can take some time to read this thought provoking article on the Two Ravens Press website.
With the recent announcement of cuts to arts funding, many people have been made aware or the perilous financial nature of creating and promoting the arts in it’s various forms. Publishing has always been a high risk area, particularly if you are aiming at a certain audience and not following a more commercial mainstream route. The following extracts from the website gives you a flavour of what Two Ravens Press are about:
“Everything that we publish, we publish with passion. We love each of our books. They say something about the author, they say something about us, and they say something about the time and the place they were born into. Each book is a person we like being around. Because each, in its own way, fights back against formulas and homogenization, against the analgesic washing-out of colour that threatens to fade our bright thoughts.”
“We are very different from most publishers in the way that we approach publishing. We live in one of the remotest regions of the (already pretty remote) Outer Hebrides on a working croft; we spend as much time as we can outside and with our growing collection of animals. When we’re not editing or typesetting our next book, trying to get an author on the radio or packing up books from website orders and making the post-office run, we stare at the sea a lot or talk to the turkeys (they have a surprisingly large conversational repertoire). We have absolutely no desire for big-city offices and all their trappings. We don’t do glittering celebrity-studded launches, we don’t do hype and we don’t do fashion. We publish only what we want to publish and believe in, sell only in ways that we consider ethical and to outlets that we can work with, and there are some activities associated with traditional publishing models that we just don’t do. We don’t publish for big sales figures (which isn’t to say that we wouldn’t like some …), rather we publish only work that we love and that we believe really needs to be published. We believe there are already probably too many books in the world; we are increasingly selective in what we might additionally inflict on it. This doesn’t in any way mean that we’re not serious about publishing. We are small and yet we are professional: our books are fully distributed and we do our very best to get them reviewed and appropriately publicised.
And we take our books very seriously: as well as publishing new writers we also publish authors of the stature of Whitbread Prize winner Alasdair Gray, James Tait Memorial Prize winner Alice Thompson, and the late internationally acclaimed Franco-American experimental writer Raymond Federman.”
I’ve have had the good fortune to have worked with Sharon and David at Two Ravens Press, and know how committed they are to producing books that they feel will make a strong contribution to the literary fabric of the country. Their books are beautifully designed and engage their readers with innovative and thought provoking work.
Take time to read this informative and heart-felt article, and if you can, go to the website and take a look at some of the excellent titles they have on offer in their catalogue. In these hard times for the arts, we should all make the effort to support imaginative and independent ventures such as this.
Click on this link to read the article in full.
amber eye phoenix
shadowing jade purity
assertive heaven
Hamish Montgomery
27-03-2011
