Very Special: Pamphlets

V. Press is an award winning publisher of Very Special pamphlets, with beautiful covers designed by Ruth Stacey. Wonderful as gifts, even to yourself.

THESE NIGHTS AT HOME




These nights at home, which follows on from Alex Reed’s earlier V. Press pamphlet A Career in Accompaniment, is very personal, and yet very familiar. This longer pamphlet voices the loneliness and isolation that follow bereavement, and the predicament of trying to begin anew. Moments of tenderness, flashback, longing and love flicker through the mind and heart as the months pass. The poems are accompanied by Keren Banning’s striking series of photographic images that are simultaneously abstract and intimate, drawing the reader further into this fragmented landscape.

“The most striking feature of Alex Reed’s poems in These nights at home is their clarity – a transparency that allows the reader in to the emotions and experience they explore. This lucid quality allows complex and deep feelings to be expressed vividly. Being able to approach the most difficult human experience so directly and honestly makes the poems moving and compelling. Specific concrete details convey loss and grief, loneliness, the pull of memory. Recurring motifs – empty rooms, hallways, doors – suggest the slow and repetitive process of grieving. There is nothing spare in the poems. Every word earns its place. The voice is quiet, restrained, attentive. The poems are not sombre. There are flashes of humour and a range of tone is created through the different poetic forms – prose poems building unsettling extended metaphors, experimental layouts suggesting a shifting sense of memory and perception. The pamphlet shows the reader what it means to be living with loss, conveying the process of grief with its ‘pacing hours’, and just a hint of a tentative way forward. It reminds us how, in the right hands, the economy of poetry can communicate the most complex of emotions.” Cynthia Fuller

“Less fraught than A Career in Accompaniment, more a slow immersive haunting, the poems in These nights at home enter a different unknown – the oceanic space of loss and absence.  Tentative minimalism provides the key to open up distances, far and near.  Here, less is more – reflective territory exquisitely distilled in Keren Banning’s spectral photographs.” Linda France

A sample poem and a sample image from this longer pamphlet can be found here.

44 pages
ISBN: 978-1-9998444-6-2
R.R.P. £7.50

PRE-ORDER These nights at home now using the paypal link below. [These nights at home is published at the end of November 2018. Pre-orders are sent out in the week of publication.]
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AGAINST THE PULL OF TIME



Against the Pull of Time is a spiritual and physical journey. On the island of Iona Jenna Plewes travels far into herself to come to terms with loss, ageing and mortality. The outer landscape is wonderfully realized. Sea, shore, shells, birds and buildings play a central role in her inner exploration. The immediacy of the pared writing in this sequence, its telling details and the sharing of a deeply-felt experience, draw the reader into Plewes’ journey.” 
Myra Schneider

“In tender, beautiful and unsentimental language Jenna Plewes takes us on a journey, walking barefoot on wet sand, sitting in a ruined nunnery, musing on the shoreline 'handcuffed to the sea'. it is a long time since I have read a collection that moved me so. One line somehow says it all: 'so many things are precious in the leaving and the letting go'. This is a collection I want to read over and over – also rare these days.”     Roselle Angwin

Against the Pull of Time
 is very deep-rooted and seamlessly woven.

R.R.P. £6.50

A sample poem from the pamphlet may be enjoyed here.

BUY Against the Pull of Time now, using the paypal link below.
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