Wendy Mulford
Co-founder of Reality Street, Wendy Mulford was raised in Wales, and lives in East Anglia and Orkney.
Besides many volumes of poetry, she has published critical essays and art criticism, edited The Virago Book of Love Poetry, and has written books on Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, and on women saints (with Sara Maitland). Wendy ran the poetry press Street Editions in Cambridge, publishing JH Prynne, Tom Raworth, John James, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and others, from 1972 until 1993, when it amalgamated with Reality Studios to form Reality Street.
THE LAND BETWEEN
Wendy Mulford co-founded Reality Street, but this is her first collection to be published by the press – and her first collection since her selected poems, and suddenly, supposing (2002). Of that book, Jeremy Hooker wrote “...it is the poet, as well as the reader, who is the surprised spirit. The writing is an opening out from the self... an opening that does not escape from language, but points beyond language...”
The Land Between shows Wendy Mulford at work in familiar, experimental and visually arresting mode in I CHINA AM, a response to her experience of South East Asia. The second section registers and attempts to make sense of sudden bereavement. The poems strive to grasp a hold in a world felt to be meaningless and almost unbearably harsh. The third section brings together poems of differing kinds from the previous seven years, writing which is characterised too by the spirit of opening, learning and unmaking the world, and also of praise, for its variousness, its beauty, its complexity.
LIMITED STOCKS AVAILABLE – UK ONLY
2009, 978-1-874400-44-8, 62pp, price £7.50
THE BAY OF NAPLES
This 1992 book was published by Reality Studios, one of Reality Street's predecessors. It's a sequence of 26 poems, each on a painting by Howard Hodgkin. Unfortunately, it is now out of print.
"The poems inhabit a world that is agitatedly cool, and the pictures a world that lies with you and burns you up." – Edwin Morgan, Parataxis