Are you a
poet working in traditionalist metrical and rhymed forms? Are you a lover of
such poetry? If so, the Red Candle Press wants to hear
from you.
The RED CANDLE PRESS, Britain’s longest established formalist poetry press, was
founded in 1970 by Dale Gunthorp and M. L. McCarthy, without financial capital
but young and feisty enough to take on the intolerant and dictatorial
prose-gone-mad poetry Establishment - it really was the
Establishment then - on behalf of verse and sanity.
There was mockery at the time, predictably, from the said Establishment, but there was quick initial support from poets such as Gordon Blundell, R.L. Cook, Mary Edwards, and Roy Harrison; and by the later part of the decade traditionalist metrical and rhymed poetry was well back on the scene. The Traditionalist revival that began in the early 1980s - of which the RCP, proudly, pars magna fuit - brought contacts from the United States and Canada, and the RCP had the pleasure of publishing work by William Davey, Michael Axtell, Andrea Abraham, Ann Keith, Henry Fischer, Paris Flammonde, and a host of others, as well as such British poets as Philip Higson, Rollinat's and Baudelaire's translator, Robin Brumby, Freda Howell.
These days, at the beginning of the 21C, it's almost an embarras de richesses - (except financially! The Red Candle Press still has little money, therefore more work offered than it can afford to bring out as quickly as it would like) - with younger poets from both sides of the Atlantic entering the ranks with valued authors of longer standing: David Hill, Pushkin's translator, Michael Fantina, Richard Bonfield, Esther Cameron, Amanda Rochford, Eric Martin, Peggy Gannon, John Rawson, John Lord, and many others. So, the Red Candle Press looks forward into the 21C. Its principal publication is, and always has been, CANDELABRUM POETRY MAGAZINE, but it has also published paperback books and saddle-stitched poetry-pamphlets.
It isn't against free verse, or for that matter against any kind of verse: no point in getting the better of one kind of bigoted Establishment and then forming another Establishment! Simply, it's a Traditionalist organisation, as always without much money, as always active for its own kind of poetic art, as always looking out for its own kind of poets and readers and supporters.
If you like the sound of it,
get in touch by post at:
1
Chatsworth Court
Outram
Road
Southsea
PO5 1RA
ENGLAND