Candlestick Press is a small, independent press publishing beautiful ‘Instead of a card’ poetry pamphlets. Based in Nottingham in the UK, we’ve been making our mini-anthologies since 2008 and have now sold over 915,000 titles – which means that we’ve shared over nine million poems with our readers all over the world.
A beautiful and intriguing anthology of poems selected by Mahendra Solanki. His choices capture the many ways in which we experience that unique sense of being at home. There are poems that evoke “the daily furniture of our lives” and others that echo with the memories of a childhood spent far away.
Contemporary poems rub shoulders with more traditional selections to create a haunting sense of what it means to belong.
WB Yeats’ famous poem of longing (evoked in the bewitching cover image created especially for Candlestick by Sarah Kirby) encapsulates the abiding spirit of the selection – and something we all instinctively feel – that home is a place we carry with us always “in the deep heart’s core”.
“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”
from ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ by WB Yeats
Our pamphlets are supplied with an envelope for posting, a bookmark for a special message and an ‘Instead of a card’ sticker to seal the back of the envelope for a lovely finishing touch.
Paperback | 20 printed pages
