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 »
Latest News
We are delighted to publish Plato’s Peach, the latest collection of poetry from John Freeman, and his first since winning the 2017 Wales Book of the Year Award.
Plato’s Peach is both a collection of individual poems which can be enjoyed in any order and an unfolding adventure which takes on fuller resonance if read in sequence. These poems combine vivid evocations of time and place with an ongoing meditation about life and death, nature and art, home and abroad, family and friendships. They are by turns – and sometimes all at once – moving, disturbing, consoling, funny, playful and profound. They invite the reader to participate, as one put it, in a joyful celebration of what it is to be sentient.
It gives us great pleasure to publish this incredible new collection – find out more!
You are warmly invited to join John for the launch of Plato’s Peach online on Wednesday 1 December. This special event is hosted by Theatre Orchard, and John will be joined by guests Linda Saunders and Amanda Rackstraw. Free but booking is essential – Book Online
With COP26 taking place in Glasgow (1-11 November), we thought we’d share some poems addressing the climate emergency.
Amanda Carpenter, Worple’s Co-Director and presenter of the Planet Pod podcast, will be in Glasgow for this crucial climate summit and podcasting every day with insights, reflections and observations from the conference. She will be in conversation with academics, policy makers, politicians, businesses, artists, not for profits, NGOs and activists. Follow the podcasts and subscribe via theplanetpod.com/cop-conversations/.
The great glacier Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, which is calving icebergs at an unprecedented rate, causing global sea levels to rise, is inspiration for Elizabeth Cook’s poem ‘Calf’, from her new collection When I Kiss the Sky.
It gives us great pleasure to announce our second publication for autumn 2021, Elizabeth Cook’s profound and revelatory new collection When I Kiss the Sky.
These poems explore the dynamics of presence and absence, the shapes they make and the continuities between them. There is lament but also affection and delight, along with a strong curiosity about the nature of change. Cook writes with simplicity and intensity, finding vivid and subtle life in what she notices.
A most welcome new collection from Elizabeth Cook: necessary, sustaining poems that brim with luminous insights and remind us time and again that there is another world and it is in this one – Michael Laskey
Find out more and order a copy here!
We are delighted to announce the publication of the fifth poetry collection by Anthony Wilson: The Afterlife
Anthony Wilson’s poems explore the borderline territory between grief and laughter, memory and forgetting, illness and health. His central subject is the way we live within family and community, questioning the roles we construct, both alone and with others. The Afterlife continues to pursue themes developed in his last collection with Worple, Riddance: mortality, mental health, the relation between body and soul, and how to live fully in the present moment.
“In these affecting, graceful poems, Anthony Wilson takes time to reflect on a life: ‘We cannot grasp what we have been given, or can give back’ and so offers his reader an essential book of (re)discovery, encounter and a true value of the present.” – Rebecca Goss
Find out more about The Afterlife
