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 over 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.

  • John Agard

    John Agard is a Guyanese poet, author of several poetry collections for both adults and children, the latest being Clever Backbone (2009). He often writes in collaboration with his partner Grace Nichols, and lives in South East England. He has travelled throughout the world performing his poetry.

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  • Anna Akhmatova

    Anna Akhmatova (1889 – 1966) is the pen-name of Anna Andreevna Gorenko who was born near the Black Sea port of Odessa, to an upper-class family. She is widely recognised as one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century and was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965. Her work ranges from short lyric poems to longer cycles such as Requiem which explores Stalin’s rule of terror.

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  • Carry Akroyd

    Carry Akroyd is a painter and printmaker living on the Cambridgeshire/Northamptonshire border. Her work reflects her local arable landscapes and the wildlife that lives there. She also has an affinity with the local Northamptonshire poet John Clare and has illustrated three collections of his poetry. She was President of the John Clare Society in 2016.

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  • Edgar Albert Guest

    Edgar Albert Guest (1881 – 1959) was a British-born American poet who became known as the ‘People’s Poet’ because of the infectious optimism of his verse. In the course of his life he wrote some 11,000 poems, many of which were syndicated in newspapers across the US. His last full collection was Living the Years, published in 1949.

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  • Edgar Allan Poe

    Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was an American writer of short stories and poems, the former famously characterised by macabre and sinister plots. His best-known poem is ‘The Raven’ in which a bereaved lover asks a raven if he will be reunited with his dead beloved in the afterlife and is repeatedly told ‘nevermore’. The French edition of Poe’s poems included a preface written by Charles Baudelaire.

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  • Marjorie Allen Seiffert

    Marjorie Allen Seiffert (1885 – 1970) was an American poet who is widely anthologised and had many poems published in The New Yorker during her lifetime. Her collections include The Name of Life (Scribner, 1938). She also wrote under pseudonyms such as Angela Cypher and Elijah Hay, the latter being a poet belonging to a fake literary movement called Spectrism.

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