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 hope that all of our friends, readers and supporters are safe and well in these difficult times.
During the last few weeks we have been sharing a daily poem from our collections. For a little moment of inspiration in your day follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and catch up with poems from Elizabeth Cook, Isabel Galleymore, Andy Brown, John Freeman and many more!
We thank you for your continued support at this time. We are still open for business and able to fulfil online orders. You can browse all of our titles on our Publications page, including the latest collections by Anthony Wilson, Peter Robinson, Patricia McCarthy and Diana Hendry.
Diana Hendry’s The Watching Stair has received high praise (justly deserved!) in a recent review by James Roderick Burns:
“While ‘The Watching Stair’ starts quietly, with a number of low-key poems in and around childhood, adolescence and early adulthood – perhaps signalling a chronological progression through the book – it soon shrugs off this traditional approach to move into unexpected, and subtly thrilling, territory.”
“Hendry’s work is controlled, its surface calm and measured, but its depths turbulent, disturbing, dogged in probing what goes on beneath.”
“There are also moments of challenge, puzzlement and delight, making the collection overall both consistent and diverse.”
“[The Watching Stair] goes on to deliver great riches of feeling, unexpected depths and meanings, and a jolt to the senses in every tightly-controlled poem. Its surfaces repay the reader’s touch, yielding to surprise and delight without ever breaking the poem’s calm skin.”
Read the full review on the High Window Press website and pick up a copy of Diana’s collection 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
Anthony will be reading at various events in autumn/winter 2019 – find out more
Don’t miss these Worple poets, who have new collections forthcoming this year, at various events and festivals this summer.
Elizabeth Cook shall be reading for the Norfolk Wildlife Trust at Cley on July 20th at 6.30, along with Jonathan Ward, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Jos Smith and Jade Cuttle. Join them for Poetry, Pizza and Pimms, arelaxing evening of poetry and prose readings inspired by our stunning coastline, its landscape wildlife and culture.
Elizabeth will also be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 24th, reading and talking about her novel Lux (Scribe, 2019), alongside Hugh Lupton – Find out more
Anthony Wilson, whose new collection The Afterlife follows his acclaimed 2012 collection Riddance, will be reading at Greenbelt Festival in Broughton House, Kettering, Northamptonshire on Friday 23rd August, before presenting the John Peck Memorial Lecture at the festival on Monday 26th. – Find out more
On Friday 13th September, Anthony will read at Shute Festival in Devon.
Plus, watch this space for launch readings for The Afterlife and a new book of prose memoir and criticism, Deck Shoes!
