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.

  • Isaac Rosenberg

    Isaac Rosenberg (1890 – 1918) was an Anglo-Jewish poet and painter whose poetry is considered to be amongst the finest written about the First World War. He arrived in the trenches as a private in 1916 and ‘August 1914’ was the first of many poems that established his reputation. In 1918 he volunteered to return to the front after a retreat and was killed one hour later.

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  • Christina Rossetti

    Christina Rossetti (1830 – 1894) was a significant voice in Victorian poetry, the youngest member of a family of poets, Pre-Raphaelite artists and critics. She was deeply religious and wrote devout, romantic and children’s poetry, as well as religious prose works. One of her best known works is Goblin Market and other poems, published in 1862.

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  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti

    Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882) was a painter and poet, brother of Christina Rossetti.  In 1848 he was one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who rejected Victorian materialism and wanted to bring back into art what they saw as a pre-Renaissance purity.  He worked on English translations of Italian poetry and published a volume of his collected poems in 1870.  His long and widely-acclaimed sonnet sequence ‘House of Life’ appeared in Ballads and Sonnets (1881).

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  • Ali Rowland

    Ali Rowland is a poet and author from Northumberland. Her poetry is sometimes about her own mental health issues and sometimes about the world in general. She is assisted in her endeavours by a wonderful husband and a beautiful border terrier. Ali won the Hexham Poetry Competition in 2023 and her stories and poems have been published in numerous journals including Dreich Magazine, The Frogmore Papers, The Northumbrian, Green Ink Press, The Open Journal of Arts and Letters, The Amphibian Press, Amsterdam Quarterly and Obsessed with Pipework.

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  • Mary Ruefle

    Mary Ruefle is an American poet and essayist. She has published many poetry collections the most recent of which is Dunce (Wave Books, 2019) which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She teaches at Vermont College and is the poet laureate of the state of Vermont.

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  • Carol Rumens

    Carol Rumens was born in South London and is a prolific writer of fiction, drama and translations. She has also published fourteen collections of poetry of which the most recent is De Chirico’s Threads (Seren 2010) and writes the highly popular ‘Poem of the Week’ feature for The Guardian.

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