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 700 historical and contemporary poets. In our pages you’ll find old favourites alongside twenty-first century voices – everyone from WH Auden to Benjamin Zephaniah. 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.
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Jean Valentine
Jean Valentine was an American poet who spent most of her life in New York City. Her collection Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 won a National Book Award and Break the Glass (2010) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She was the State Poet of New York from 2008 – 2010.
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Edmund Vance Cooke
Edmund Vance Cooke (1866 – 1932) was a Canadian poet. His first job on leaving school was in a sewing machine factory. He is perhaps best known for his poem ‘How Did You Die?’ with its popular message of fortitude. His books include A Patch of Pansies (1894) and From the Book of Extenuations (1926).
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Robin Vaughan-Williams
Robin Vaughan-Williams is from London, but moved to Sheffield in 1999, where he ran Spoken Word Antics for five years, including a radio show. His sequence ‘The Manager’ was published by Happenstance Press as a pamphlet in March 2010. After a spell in Iceland, he now lives in Nottingham, where he runs the Nottingham Writers’ Studio and is involved in organising the quarterly Word of Mouth live literature night.
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Rebecca Vincent
Rebecca Vincent is an artist and printmaker based in the North East of England. She studied at the Ruskin School in Oxford and then completed a Masters degree at Newcastle University. Rebecca’s prints and etchings are inspired by the natural world and are characterised by powerful shapes and rich colours. She has exhibited widely in UK galleries and her work has been acquired by collectors all over the world.
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882) was one of the most popular US poets of his day. He was the first Americans to completely translate Dante’s Divine Comedy and was one of the so-called ‘fireside poets’ of New England. One of his most famous works is ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ – an epic poem featuring native American characters.
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David Wagoner
David Wagoner (1926 – 2021) was an American poet and novelist, born in Ohio to an opera singer mother. In his long life he published 23 poetry collections and 10 novels. Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems appeared in 1999 and the consensus among critics was that the new poems were among his very best. One of his recurring themes is nature and the destruction of the natural world.
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