Candlestick Press Launches ~ Ten Poems About Home

...Launched today...

Candlestick Press
23 March 2017

This latest title from Candlestick Press is a haunting selection of poems that reflects our complex feelings about the true meaning of home. Mahendra Solanki’s choices encompass the many ways in which we experience that unique sense of being at home through poems that evoke “the daily furniture of our lives” or echo with the memories of a childhood spent far away. Contemporary poems rub shoulders with more traditional selections to create a vivid sense of the abiding spirit of belonging.

Yeats’s famous poem of longing is evoked in the beautiful cover image created especially for Candlestick by artist Sarah Kirby. Yeats expresses what we all instinctively feel – that home is a place we carry with us always “in the deep heart’s core”.

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”

from ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ by WB Yeats

From Harrison to Larkin and from Cavafy to Dharker there are poems here that will delight and intrigue every reader. 

Mahendra Solanki’s poetry has explored notions of home and belonging for over 30 years. His work has been broadcast by the BBC and published in Britain and abroad in magazines and anthologies. His most recent collection is The Lies We Tell (Shoestring Press, 2014).

Poems by CP Cavafy, Imtiaz Dharker, Thomas Hardy, Tony Harrison, Philip Larkin, Linda Hogan, Grace Nichols, Mahendra Solanki, Wislawa Szymborska and WB Yeats. 

To continue the Candlestick tradition of supporting a range of charities through pamphlet sales, a donation will be made to Shelter. 

What did I think about it..

I few years ago I discovered the stunning poetry pamphlets published by Candlestick Press and, since then, have not only acquired my own collection, but have given away just as many as gifts to people I care about.

As always, I am charmed by the quiet beauty of these poetry pamphlets and I'm really thrilled to be able to support the launch of Ten Poems about Home. And it's not just because in this pamphlet is one is my favourite  W B Yeats poem,  The Lake Isle of Innisfree, and those who share my love of the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon will know why I love this poem so much, but it's also because there are nine other beautiful poems which are all poignant reminders of why we all call home, home.

From, Thomas Hardy's The Self-Unseeing, 'Childlike, I danced in a dream; Blessings emblazoned that day:' to the beautiful simplicity of Mahendra Solanki's verse, Home...'It's what brings us back to earth, another ritual, at home' 

And for me, an emotional response to what has happened in London over the last 24 hours can be beautifully summed up in the opening verse of Philip Larkin's ethereal..

Home is so Sad.

Home is so sad, It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of those who were last to go

As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

Of anyone to please, it withers so,

Having no heart to put aside the theft.

Candlestick Press is a small, independent press publishing sumptuously produced poetry pamphlets that serve as a wonderful alternative to a greetings card, with matching envelopes and bookmarks left blank for your message. Their subjects include Cricket, London, Lesbian and Gay, Revenge, Babies and Fathers. Candlestick Press pamphlets are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, galleries and garden centres nationwide and available to order online.

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With thanks to Candlestick Press I have one copy of Ten Poems about Home

 for One UK Winner of this giveaway.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Good Luck

~***~