About The Rockingham Press
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Featured Titles
 | Mrs. Valley's War by Feyyaz Kayacan Fergar First English translation of a wartime ‘Letter from London’ — winner of the distinguished Turkish Language Academy prize £7.99 |  | Poems Antibes by William Oxley "William Oxley at his best uses a direct no-nonsense first-person voice, with a satirical edge... I admire Oxley's efforts to write a spiritual poetry for our time and his refusal to give up on the traditional subject..." |
Middle East titles have included MODERN TURKISH POETRY (a Poetry Book Society recommendation), MODERN PERSIAN POETRY and works by Feyyaz Kayacan Fergar and Oktay Rifat.
Poets published by Rockingham include:
Judi Benson
Anne-Marie Fyfe
Adèle Geras
John Greening
James Kirkup
Jane Kirwan
Lotte Kramer
Sean Street
Edward Storey
Prose works have included the autobiography of William Oxley, NO ACCOUNTING FOR PARADISE and a biography of John Scott, the Quaker poet friend of Dr. Johnson.
This year we are publishing three poetry collections; the first - Splintering the Dark by Wendy French has just been published. Also just released is Lotte Kramer's eighth collection, Black Over Red, and a third Rockingham collection from American poet and anthologist, Judi Benson, entitled The Thin Places is due in November.
Moniza Alvi has said of Wendy French's first full collection that it is "packed with risk-taking poems, cut close to the bone." Wendy is the former headteacher of a hospital school for disturbed pupils and there are poems about them, about children in Africa and about the death of a dearly-loved niece. There is also a wonderful sequence of poems introduced by fragments of the poems of Sappho. Wendy French is the author of two pamphlets: Sky Over Bedlam and We Have A Little Sister And She Hath No Breasts (from tall-lighthouse). She has also edited two Rockingham anthologies of hospital children's poems -- Dog Bark (for the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital School) and What's Your Problem? (for the Guys Hospital Evelina School).
Published autumn 2004 and selling well at home and abroad, Of Birds and Men is the remarkable collection from an Iranian poet. Mahmud Kianush is a poet, novelist, critic, the founder of children's poetry in Iran, as well as a broadcaster and translator (incl. the anthology Modern Persian Poetry for Rockingham). Now he has gathered the English poems he has been writing since settling here from Tehran in 1976.
Of Birds and Men : Poems from a Persian Divan uses the traditional forms of Persian poetry -- including poems addressed to birds -- to comment tellingly on the modern world. Here are poems about dictatorship, political hypocrisy, casualties of war in Bosnia, the magical lure of money, jet travel and the fate of the Dodo.
Frances Wilson, the author of Rearranging the Sky, lives in Hertfordshire, where she writes, paints and runs workshops. She has won prizes in many competitions, including The National and The Bridport. This is her second collection, about which Michael Laskey has said: "Rearranging the Sky, Frances Wilson's patiently accumulated second collection is a joy -- a satisfying patchwork of necessary celebratory poems that honour our ordinary human experience, in language that is vivid, precise and natural. Even at her most painfully elegaic, there is irrepressible lightness in her rhythms, a vitality that is ultimately consoling."
David Perman had a pamphlet from Acumen Occasional Publications in 1997 -- entitled The Buildings. That included poems about his childhood in Islington. Now in his first full collection, A Wasp on the Stair, he extends his range with poems about interviewing the Ayatollah Khomeini, the point of view of one grieving American after 9/11, the world after apartheid and the loss of Britain's treasure of elm trees.
There are also poems of humour, satire and love. The collection was launched at the Torbay Poetry Festival in October last year.
Other recent poetry publications include two chapbooks from membes of the Ware Poets -- In the Lee of the Land by Julia Smellie, and A Stampede of Seconds by Jane Evans.
Also still available are the splendid collections of Sally Carr -- Handing on the Genes -- Danielle Hope -- The Stone Ship -- and Jane Kirwan -- The Man Who Sold Mirrors.
Contact Details:
w: http://www.rockingham-press.co.ukt: +44 (0) 1920 467868
f: +44 (0) 1920 467868
11 Musley Lane
Ware
Herts
SG12 7EN
United Kingdom