Welcome to Worple Press
Worple Press was founded in 1997 and is co-directed by Peter and Amanda Carpenter. We publish collections of poetry, and arts titles. We like to showcase new writing and we welcome diversity of format and approach. Above all, we look for excellence. Read more »
News & Blog
Worple poets John Greening and Andy Brown are two of twenty-nine poets to feature on the newly launched poetry app “Words in Air”, available now from the App Store. From Westminster Bridge to Westbury, Hammersmith to the Outer Hebrides, the app “offers you a unique way into poetry: poetry-in-place, in the palm of your hand. Enjoy a poem instantly, on the very spot which sparked its creation. Discover new poems — and poets. Re-discover familiar places through a poem. See which poem was inspired by a place nearest to you, across the UK. Stand in the place where these poets stood, and gain a deeper insight into the poem, and the place. Words in Air will pinpoint the place for you that sparked each poem. Visit, virtually and for real, to gain a deeper understanding of the creative process, through the revealing relationship between poetry and place.”
An event featuring John Freeman, Kate North, Peter Finch and Chris Torrance has been reviewed by John Lavin in Wales Arts Review. ‘Wales and the British Poetry Revival’ celebrated the influence of Welsh poets on the movement which first appeared in Britain as a reaction to the Beat poets in America. Great review of a wonderful evening. Lavin writes of Freeman, “There is a precision about Freeman’s use of language that, rather than putting me immediately in mind of one of his poetic forbears, makes me think instead of Julian Barnes and his direct antecedent, Flaubert. Like those writers, there is an elegiac quality to Freeman’s writing which suggests that, in trying to capture a moment with such a degree of exactitude, he is almost trying to make that moment happen again. And this, of course, is what all great art does. It tries to make what matters to the artist live for all eternity.” Read the review here.
Worple’s first publication of 2013 is John Greening’s Knot. Based on the design of a seventeenth-century knot garden, Greening’s new sequence makes consort music with the poets of Elizabethan England. Sonnets and verse letters are woven around a journal of life in a twenty-first century writers’ retreat (Hawthornden Castle) and a prose allegory of Ben Jonson’s famous walk from London to Scotland to visit William Drummond. The collection concludes with a witty modern masque. As Ian MacMillan has said of Greening’s previous work, the poet ’revels in other voices, other speech patterns… The formal control is excellent and the ability to get inside the heads of dead men enviable.’ Available for purchase by Paypal or postal order form.
Clive Wilmer will be reading at this year’s Poetry-next-the-Sea Festival in Wells, Norfolk on Sunday 12th May. The three day festival features readings from a variety of poets as well as different talks, workshops and competition readings. Find out about Clive’s Worple collections here. That same weekend, Michael McKimm will be reading at the John Hewitt Spring Festival in Carnlough, County Antrim. Michael will be reading from the forthcoming Worple collection Fossil Sunshine.
