📖 Book Review ~ Ten Poems about Chocolate from Candlestick Press

Candlestick Press
August 2025

My thanks to the publisher for my copy of this pamphlet 

Everyday treat, indulgent luxury or an addiction we can’t or won’t break – many of us have a passionate relationship with chocolate, making it perfect subject matter for poetry.

This luscious mini-anthology celebrates preferences for milk or plain, pralines or fondants, rich truffles or the sweetest hot chocolate drinks. Anyone who has ever craved chocolate will identify with poems that explore its sensuous aspects – taste, texture, mouthfeel – in an intensity akin to love.

And if chocolate is like love, then these poems explore the depth and shape of that love:

“Knotted smoke, dark punch
of earth and night and leaf,
for a taste of you

any woman would gladly
crumble to ruin.”

from ‘Chocolate’ by Rita Dove

These entertaining, unexpected and moving poems also explore the history of chocolate, and the price paid by those whose hard work brings it to our lips.

Poems by Clare Best, Alison Bracjenberry, Barbara Crooker, Rita Dove, Roy Marshall, Ife Olatona, Pauline Prior-Pitt, Louis Simpson, Oenone Thomas and Noel Williams.

Donation to Fairtrade Foundation 

📖 My Review..

I adore chocolate in all shapes and forms from smooth and silky, to bitter and crunchy, there is something about the taste of chocolate that just makes the world seem a calmer place. This fine anthology of ten chocolate inspired poems will have your tastebuds tingling.

‘Oh, chocolate! From the spice bazaars 

Of Africa, hulled in mills, beaten, 

pressed in bars. The cold slab of a cave’s

interior, when all the stars have gone to sleep’

From Ode to Chocolate by Barbara Crooker

I once knew someone who had worked, as a teenager, in the chocolate factory at Bourneville and even years later the smell and taste of chocolate made her feel really sick.

‘ When you start in a chocolate factory,

the teacher said (why did she glance at me ?)

they say, “Eat all you want” . After a week

They know the  slightest taste will make you sick.

This may have been a story adults tell,

All confidence, no proof. Like laws. Like Hell.’

From  Bournville Babies by Alison Brackenberry

There’s something for everyone in this collection and more than enough to satisfy any chocolate cravings with poems which express the sensual nature of chocolate, the comforting taste of it when we need a pick me up and the endless selection of confectionery which is available to us 24 hours a day. So, whatever your fancy, be it the simple sweetness of milk chocolate, the decadence of rich heavy duty noir, or the lure of a box of hand decorated delights, Ten Poems about Chocolate will satisfy your chocolate cravings and is the perfect gift instead of a card to the chocolate lovers in your life and even better if accompanied by a selection of their favourite chocolatey treats 🍫

About the Publisher 

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 Mountains, Clouds, Walking, Birds, Wine and Happiness. Candlestick Press pamphlets are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, galleries and garden centres nationwide and available to order online.

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