Candlestick Press – 'Instead of a card' poetry pamphlets | UK based independent publisher

Candlestick Press

Biographies

Here you can find out more about the huge range of poets we feature in our pamphlets and the artists whose work appears on our beautiful covers.

We’ve now published poems by almost 850 historical and contemporary poets. In our pages you’ll find old favourites alongside twenty-first century voices – everyone from WH Auden to Belinda Zhawi. Although our emphasis is on British poetry, you’ll also find Irish, American and Australian writers. We hope these pages will encourage you to explore further the work of a poet you’ve enjoyed in one of our pamphlets.

  • Robert Pinsky

    Robert Pinsky is an American poet and critic. His most recent books include At the Founding Hospital (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) and Selected Poems (2012). He was US Poet Laureate from 1997 – 2000. As Laureate he set up the ‘Favorite Poem Project’ which saw people from all walks of life selecting and recording a reading of their favourite poem. An anthology Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology proved highly successful.

    Featured in

  • Ruth Pitter

    Emma Thomas ‘Ruth’ Pitter (1897 – 1992), CBE, FRSL was a British poet who published eighteen poetry collections in her lifetime and was the first woman to receive the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, in 1955. She was appointed a CBE in 1979 to honour her many contributions to English literature.

    Featured in

  • Stanley Plumly

    Stanley Plumly was a prolific American poet who loved the English Romantics and wrote a book about John Keats. His 2009 collection Old Heart (2009) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist in the National Book Award. He was Maryland Poet Laureate for many years.

    Featured in

  • Rachel Plummer

    Rachel Plummer is a UK poet who was born in London and lives in Edinburgh. She was a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writer Award for poetry in 2016 and has had poems published in magazines including Mslexia, The Dark Horse, The Stinging Fly and Agenda.  Her pamphlet of sci-fi poems The Parlour Guide to Exo-Politics (House Press, 2017) imagines aliens landing in Scotland’s ancient woodland and explores themes such as gender and homelessness.

    Featured in

  • Jacob Polley

    Jacob Polley was born in Carlisle, Cumbria. He has published a novel and four collections of poetry, including most recently Jackself (Picador, 2016) which won the TS Eliot Prize. His poetry is characterised by a lyric intensity, often harnessing strange and unsettling aspects of the natural world. His work also contains elements of folklore, riddle and nursery rhyme.

    Featured in

  • Bethany W Pope

    Bethany W Pope is an award-winning British-American writer who currently lives in China. Pope’s work includes the poetry collections A Radiance (Cultured Llama, 2012), Undisturbed Circles (Lapwing, 2014).  In 2016 Indigo Dreams published a poetry collection The Rag and Boneyard and a novel entitled Masque.

    Featured in