Two Rivers Press – förlag

Get up close to the beauty and detail of nature through the artwork of award-winning UK artist, Julia Trickey. See how ordinary and sometimes overlooked subjects, such as leaves and fading flowers, can be centre stage and come to life in this beautiful showcase of some of Julia's best-loved botanical watercolours.Having been a tutor of botanical art for many years, teaching as far afield as Moscow and New York, Julia loves to help others explore the potential of watercolour and to discover the keys to a good botanical portrait. In this book she shares some of these insights as well as the motivation behind her favourite projects, together with some of the processes and watercolour techniques involved. Take inspiration from these glowing, contemporary watercolours in a book that is both beautiful and useful.

Bonjour Mr Inshaw is a homage by the award-winning poet Peter Robinson to David Inshaw, the celebrated painter, whom he first met during the artist’s years as Creative Arts Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the mid-1970s. Largely produced in an unexpected burst of inspiration after a visit to the painter’s studio in Devizes early in 2019, these poems combine memories of Inshaw’s paintings, or characteristic English landscapes, with experiences of his company and conversation.Showing a formal flexibility and deftness characteristic of this poet’s work, they reflect on the role of art in a time of political and cultural division. Presented in an en face format, Bonjour Mr Inshaw beautifully illustrates its ekphrastic encounters and allows us to reflect in turn on this contemporary example of the centuries-old dialogue between the arts of poetry and painting.‘Following the visionary traditions of such quintessentially English predecessors as Samuel Palmer … or Stanley Spencer … Inshaw’s paintings discover the mystical in what could just as easily be overlooked as the mundane.’ – Rachel Campbell-Johnston, art critic for The Times ‘Robinson is the finest poet alive when it comes to the probing of shifts in atmosphere, momentary changes in the weather of the mind, each poem an astonishingly fine-tuned gauge for recording the pressures and processes that generate lived occasions’ – Adam Piette in The Reader

Martha Kapos imagines sonata form as a narrative structure – with relations to parents giving rise to the two key themes, the child’s conflicts, modulations and resolutions between the two outlining an emotional trajectory that leads from early life, the exposition, through adulthood, development, to the new poems embodying the recapitulations of old age. In his Afterword, American musicologist Lawrence Kramer writes that the ‘revisited past is the only past we have. The question of sonata form is how to find it.’ The interlocking of themes and images here makes this Selected and New Poems a remarkable, and psychologically acute, showcase for Martha Kapos’s work.

What are the ingredients for a successful career as a botanical artist? In The Tapestry of Life, Susan Christopher-Coulson identifies the threads that have formed the warp and weft of her profession: the natural world and her love of drawing woven together with skills in design and making. Working in coloured pencils on board or watercolour paper, Susan's enthusiasm for joyful juxtapositions of colour and form is infectious and a practical section detailing the tools of her trade along with a step-by-step tutorial featuring a broken English Florists' tulip will equip readers interested in trying the medium for themselves. Take inspiration from the compositions, the subjects and the presentation of Susan's award-winning work but most of all, from the joy that permeates this account of a life spent making botanical art.

There's more to Reading than traffic, concrete and busy people. Wildlife flourishes amidst the urban hustle and with a couple of hundred open spaces, some ancient woodlands and two great rivers, Reading rewards the appreciative naturalist. Wander from town centre to suburbs exploring the parks and meadows, following the rivers and the wooded ridges, watching the seasons change. You'll be surprised at what you find.Over 25 years Adrian Lawson chronicled the wildlife he encountered in his days working in the parks, walking his dogs in the woods and riding his bike around the town. This book takes us through the calendar year with a selection of articles from his long-running newspaper column, Rural Reading, plus some new and previously unpublished pieces. Accompanied by perceptive and very personal illustrations from Geoff Sawers, equally devoted to the natural history of Reading, this exquisite collection will open your eyes to the wild side of town.

Hadil Tamim was born in Al-Yarmouk Refugee Camp south of Damascus, Syria. Trained in ceramic and Islamic decorative art, for the last two decades she has been living in Reading, where she has turned to her art to create a bridge between two homes and two cultures. Her artworks draw on the architectural forms of the buildings in Reading for structure and colour and the flowers found in and around the town for the arabesque. With excerpts from her sketchbook and practical sections on the techniques she uses, along with commentary from Adrian Lawson on the flowers depicted, this book shows a beautifully harmonious meeting of two cultures.

In the centre of Reading, stands a prominent stone obelisk supporting three bright lamps. It was built in 1804 at the expense of Edward Simeon, a director of the Bank of England, and designed by the great locally-born architect John Soane. It caused controversy and attracted criticism at first, and stood neglected and unlit in scruffy surroundings for many years, but after a full restoration it once again stands proudly and usefully in a worthy setting. Adam Sowan’s fifth local book traces the origins of the obelisk, the development of its design, and changes to its structure and surroundings over the last 200 years. It also chronicles Soane’s other Reading projects – some mooted, some built, some demolished and some mythical. The architect’s own drawings are complemented by newspaper photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Cat Jeoffry is a self-contained passage from Christopher Smart's eccentric 18th century masterpiece Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Lamb) and the most famous piece of poetry ever written about a cat. Poignantly, Jeoffry was Smart's companion during his lengthy confinement for mental illness. His close and affectionate observations of the cat's antics both entertained him and inspired his moving religious celebration. Often anthologised, this passage brims over with the prankish playfulness and sudden ferocity of one of the literary world's most famous cats. Quirky, realistic, affectionate, it is at the same time a remarkable spiritual meditation. This new edition contains a commentary and notes by Tom Woodman. Peter Hay's characteristic black and white illustrations rampage through the book.

In May of 1895, the most dazzling man of letters of the nineteenth century was sentenced to two years with hard labour for ‘acts of gross indecency with another male person.’ On his release he moved to France, where he wrote the Ballad: an anguished plea for prison reform, and a passionate expression of sympathy for his fellow prisoners, those “souls in pain”. Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol was a success from its first publication, and to this day some of its lines are among the most famous in the English language. In this powerfully illustrated edition Two Rivers Press presents Wilde’s Ballad alongside Peter Hay’s original images and adds a specially-commissioned Afterword by Peter Stoneley which draws on unpublished material in the prison archives.

Robert Gillmor, one of Britain's most influential wildlife artists, illustrated four sets of pictorial stamps featuring birds for Royal Mail's Post & Go. Brought together and reproduced here for the first time, in larger-than-stamp size, these prints demonstrate the author's lifelong love and appreciation of our nation's birds. His own account of the process by which his linocuts are made, along with anecdotal descriptions of his bird encounters, bring the pictures to life. This beautifully produced collection will be coveted by wildlife lovers, artists and stamp collectors alike.

Tom Phillips’ first full-length collection navigates terrains which range from Eastern Europe, Australia and the Home Counties to his own back garden in Bristol. From the different perspectives these vantage points offer, it unearths connections between chance meetings and ‘big history’, family stories and the state we’re in. It also looks at poetry itself as a ground on which to recreate – and negotiate with – one thing that nobody can change: the past.

The very first book in the world to be illustrated with photographs was produced in Reading between 1844 and 1846. In 1843, William Henry Fox Talbot set up the first commercial studios to mass-produce photographs from negatives and he chose the Berkshire town of Reading as its location. The Reading Establishment, as it became known, marks a pivotal moment in the development of photography. Martin Andrews tells the story of these momentous events and places them in the context of the discovery and early history of photography. Told in a lively and engaging way, the story starts with a mystery. Who is the strange, foreign gentleman buying unusual substances in the chemist shops of Reading - is he a forger or a spy?

‘The excitement of reading David Attwooll’s poems lies in the poet’s intense relationship to language and the verbal and textual musicianship with which he treats his subject matter. From the Goths, Transylvanians and teenage samurai, escaped from the pages of books, to email spam or jazz, to memories about childhood and place, these poems capture Attwooll’s delight in the world around him.’ Jenny Lewis

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is universally recognized as among the most important twentieth-century German-language poets. Here, for the first time, are all the surviving translations of his poetry made by Ruth Speirs (1916-2000), a Latvian exile who joined the British literary community in Cairo during World War Two, becoming a close friend of Lawrence Durrell and Bernard Spencer. Though described as 'excellent' and 'the best' by J. M. Cohen on the basis of magazine and anthology appearances, copyright restrictions meant that during her lifetime, with the exception of a Cairo-published Selected Poems (1942), Speirs was never to see her work gathered between covers and in print.This volume, edited by John Pilling and Peter Robinson, brings Speirs' translations the belated recognition they deserve. Her much-revised and considered versions are a key document in the history of Rilke's Anglophone dissemination. Rhythmically alive and carefully faithful, they give a uniquely mid-century English accent to the poet's extraordinary German, and continue to bear comparison with current efforts to render his tenderly taxing voice.

Edith Morley (1875-1964) was a scholar and the main 20th century editor of the works of Henry Crabb Robinson. She was the first woman appointed to a chair at an English university-level institution. Born into a middle-class Victorian family, she hated being a girl, but a forward-thinking home life and a good education enabled her to overcome prejudices and become Professor of English Language at University College, Reading, in 1908. An early feminist with a strong social conscience, she ‘fought… with courage… and passionate sincerity for human rights and freedom.’ Covering the vividly described era of her late Victorian childhood, her student days with the increasing freedoms they brought, the early feminist movement, the growing pains of a new university and, much later, the traumas endured by refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, this absorbing memoir brings alive a very different era, one foundational to the freedoms we enjoy today. Intended to ‘relate my experiences to the background of my period and to portray incidents in the life of a woman born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century’, Edith Morley’s 1944 memoir, Before and After, was written a few years after her retirement.

What historical tragedy could possibly make a young Wallingford girl daub a wall with her own tears?What really happened to the family who encountered a UFO in Stanford-in-the-Vale?What made a Highworth Squire’s ghost choose to be banished to a barrel of cider?And what does the Uffington White Horse get up to once every hundred years?The Vale of the White Horse and the beautiful countryside of South Oxfordshire is a landscape steeped in thousands of years of legends, history and mystery. Here are witches, monsters and ghosts; old legends and modern-day tales of strange encounters with the unknown. From the mildly curious to the frighteningly inexplicable, The Veiled Vale is a treasure trove of fabulous folklore and modern mysteries. Illustrations by Peter Hay.

On Magnetism contains poems about loss and remembrance, about the relation of the Renaissance and the Classical worlds to our own, about locales within lives. They are about sounding the world, and about measuring our responses to it through its various musics. The poems in the book resonate out from the title sonnet sequence, a capricious tribute to Elizabethan ‘magnetism man’ William Gilbert. Their themes and language echo compellingly back and forth across its different occasions and inspirations.‘These are poems that are deeply informed by the music of the classical lyrical tradition, but which speak to readers everywhere in clear and compelling ways. Moving, delicate on the surface but packing punch after punch, some of these poems will move you to tears.’ – Naomi Wolf‘On Magnetism is a sustained meditation on magnetism in all its senses. This is a life-enhancing book, a compellingly eloquent compilation of elegies, and of love-poems addressed to people and to the world.’ – Bernard O’Donoghue‘This collection, as Steven Matthews puts it, is a long walk in his “dad’s boots” around familiar landmarks: family, flowers, artistic and scientific artefacts. The poems are illuminated by the changing light of the seasons, by the poet’s tender, steady, considering gaze, and by an intellectual patience that allows us to see things as they were, as they are, and, slowly, anew.’ – Kate Clanchy

Embroidered in 1885-1886, Reading's version of the famous Bayeux Tapestry is a faithful, full-length replica of the original except in a few beguiling details. True to the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, its Victorian makers in the Leek Embroidery Society, matched their materials, colours and techniques to those of the eleventh century nuns thought to have created the original. The result is an extraordinarily vibrant reproduction, important in its own right and on permanent display in a purpose-built gallery in Reading Museum.Scene-by-scene, read through the story of the succession to the English throne by first Harold and then William the Conqueror. Find out why the Duke of Normandy had a claim to be King of England and what the original purpose of the tapestry may have been. Discover how Victorian society's values affected the replica and how it came to reside in Reading, so fittingly close to the ruins of the Abbey built by William's youngest son, Henry I.

Reading’s Abbey, founded in 1121 by King Henry I of England, was huge and wealthy. Throughout its 400-year life the royal Abbey was visited regularly by Kings and Queens, hosted Parliaments and royal weddings and was a famous destination for medieval pilgrims. But Henry VIII ordered its dissolution in 1539 and although the monastic buildings were used for a time as a royal palace, the stone proved useful for, among other things, shoring up the defences of the town during the Civil War. By the 18th century, one of the most impressive Abbeys in England had been reduced to a picturesque ruin.· Discover how the Abbey and its associated buildings were originally laid out on a promontory between the Thames and Kennet.· Read features on monastic life, royal burials, and Abbot Hugh Cook Faringdon who was executed.· Find out about the famous 19th century architects who rejuvenated the Abbey Quarter.· Learn about the technicalities of the 21st century conservation work.· Walk the Abbey Quarter using the guide and map to discover the hidden gems history has left behind and find out where some of the Abbey stone has ended up.This book connects you directly with the past, inspires you to be part of a future that values the Abbey’s legacy, and demonstrates just how important a landmark we still have at the centre of modern Reading.

Marking the 800th anniversary of the Forest Charter, award-winning botanical artist Christina Hart-Davies celebrates our long relationship with trees. Since pre-historic times they have provided us with shelter, fuel, medicine, food and even the air we breathe. They have tanned leather, dyed cloth and made everything from cathedrals to clothes-pegs. We have told stories about them, admired their magnificent beauty and woven them into our spiritual lives. Following A Wild Plant Year, which recorded the folklore and cultural history of our native wildflowers, in The Greenwood Trees Christina looks at the history, folklore and virtues of our native trees - and a few well-known introductions too - all illustrated with her exquisitely detailed watercolour paintings.We have relied on trees throughout our history. We still do, and we always will. Touch wood.· Which tree provides a talisman supposed to protect against lightning?· Which firewood burns best, even when green?· Which tree should you plant by the dairy and the privy to deter flies?

Precarious Lives, Jean Watkins’ second collection, celebrates the diversity of wildlife, landscape, art and human experience. Events and lives are described in sensuous detail. Throughout, the poet is conscious of our tenuous hold on life, the perennial threats we face, as well as those more recent ones inaugurated by the coming of climate change.from reviews of Scrimshaw (Two Rivers Press, 2013):‘Jean Watkins … illustrates a particular gift for concrete detail with poems so rich in the senses that they seem to lift off the page … This collection also includes a number of poems which have a sparkly ‘stand alone’ quality’ – The North‘Watkins works our imaginations through our senses and, as with the best short poems, the story is rich in what Roland Barthes called blind field, the white area around a photograph, the world around a poem’ – London Grip‘Watkins’ sense of detail is sharp, whether describing nature, an urban scene in Reading or family matters. … Make no mistake, these are poems crafted as carefully as the artefacts and heirlooms they sometimes describe … and I am left wanting more’ – The Interpreter’s House

Brick features prominently in the towns of the Thames Valley, because the local geology provides little good building stone. Reading is particularly rewarding for the brick-fancier, thanks to the variety of colours available and the inventive patterns that Victorian bricklayers loved to make. Illustrated throughout with photographs of surviving examples, Reading Bricks and Brickwork revels in the delights of air bricks and crinkle-crankle walls, gets back to basics with bonding, tells the 100-year story of a successful Victorian brick maker and pays homage to Alfred Waterhouse. A walking tour gives the reader the opportunity to see the more notable examples of Reading's brickwork for themselves.

Two Girls and a Beehive offers a minutely observed exploration of the life and work of visionary artist Stanley Spencer and his first wife, Hilda Carline. Inspired by paintings, letters, personal and social history, these poems illuminate Spencer's creative legacy and engage the reader with the contradictory beatitudes of his art.‘Nothing less than a masterpiece of ekphrasis, this is a work of extraordinary unity, daring and emotional breadth… These poems marvellously reconfigure Spencer’s tawny pigments, scenes of warfare and bohemian domesticity, couplings in low-ceilinged rooms, flowered prints, the strange militancy of his Christian faith and, above all, the annihilation of a woman artist on the altars of desire, betrayal and art. I am smitten from the first page to the last.’ANNIE FREUD ‘A marvellous act of dual authorship by two poets at the top of their game. Something magical happens in these pages. Works of visual power exchange speech with poems written in response to them. Biographical poems thoroughly inhabit and re-imagine the minds of Stanley and Hilda Spencer. The book is an act of what Dante called visible speaking (esto visible parlare): visual practice takes on a refreshed verbal life; the landscapes of paintings rise clear in the mind’s eye; and their subjects speak newly to the mind’s ear.’DAVID MORLEY‘An original and impressive collection, varied yet unified.’ ANTHONY THWAITE

A wide-ranging and fact-filled compendium of influential women, all with a connection to the Reading area. Some are well known international names, others deserve to be. They are pioneers, familiar faces, recognisable voices, unsung heroes, campaigners, world changers, socialists, celebrities, Olympic champions, writers, artists, and scientists.This book features more than 60 individual Women who have a connection with Reading and have made a notable difference in the world. They include a fish scientist called ET, an air racer and one of Britain’s worst serial killers. Illustrated with a quirky mix of artistic styles, chosen to complement the individuals’ stories, this book will open your eyes to the parts women have played in our town’s life over centuries.

Discover a whole new realm of botanical painting – the natural life forms that coexist with flowering plants, revealed in exquisite detail. Traditionally, botanical art has focused on the flowers, leaves and form of plants. They are depicted in solitary glory on a page, divorced from the life forms that live alongside them in nature. But award-winning UK botanical painter, Christina Hart-Davies, believes passionately that flowers are only part of the picture and loves to explore the different stages, related species, habitats and associated creatures that provide their setting in the wild. She looks at plants and other life forms from all angles – scientific, aesthetic and cultural – to tell The Whole Story. Showcasing examples of her most popular works, The Whole Story draws on Christina’s long and parallel careers in both art and illustration. Take inspiration from her enthusiasm for the details and beauty of all aspects of the natural world and benefit from her experience as she shares techniques for painting moss and insects as well as advice on composition and lettering. This book will transform your perspective and inspire you to look beyond the flowers.

Relive the decade when Reading's music scene turned itself up to 11 and really started to rock.This hugely well-informed and entertaining account of live music in Reading between 1966 and 1976 charts the journey from the emergence of psychedelia to the dawn of punk, and brings into focus the many musicians and bands – from The Amboy Dukes to The Who – that played at venues around the town. Read about the early years of the Reading Festival, lost and much missed music venues, and local musical heroes. Includes a foreword by Mike Cooper.

Joseph René Noyau (1911–84) was a Creolophone and Francophone Mauritian writer and poet who wrote under a number of pseudonyms including Jean Erenne which he used for the poems in this collection. Noyau lived and wrote at a crucial time in the history of the island of Mauritius. He was a passionately committed man of letters and a pioneer of personal and literary freedom in the march to an independent Mauritius. This book presents a selection of Noyau’s poems in their original French and in English translation.From Peter Pegnall:'There are many reasons to be fascinated by René Noyau… He cannot be pigeonholed in any particular style or subject matter, moves from the earthy to the ethereal, often in the same poem. A devotee of the surreal image, exotic and startling, he is also capable of a raw clarity that hammers home his meaning. Like many true artists, René was not the best custodian or promoter of his work and his native land was not entirely ready for his force or originality. The current volume is an effort to reach an audience he might never have imagined, to be a recognition and a discovery for years to come, crossing age and cultural barriers.'~Joseph René Noyau (1911-84), écrivain et poète mauricien, créolophone et francophone, utilisait un bon nombre de pseudonymes. Les poèmes de ce recueil sont signés Jean Erenne. Il vivait et écrivait à une époque critique de l’histoire de l’île Maurice. Homme de lettres engagé, il était passionnément dévoué à la liberté d’expression tant sur le plan personnel que littéraire, dans la marche vers une île Maurice indépendante. Ce livre contient une sélection bilingue de poèmes de Noyau dans leur langue d’origine, le français, et leur traduction en anglais.

The ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ (Paris Scenes) section of Les Fleurs du Mal contains eighteen poems which record a twenty-four-hour tour of the city: a type of Joycean journey from the point of view of a dandy Odysseus. Many of the poems in the sequence possess the sharpness and intensity of a dream, a dédoublement, enabling us to contemplate life in a manner that merges the fantastic and the sordidly realistic.These new translations are accompanied by artist Sally Castle’s responses prompted by the work of Constantin Guys, Baudelaire’s favourite ‘painter of modern life’.‘These unblinking translations by Ian Brinton offer us a revival of Baudelaire’s offense against public morals. Hand-in-hand with the poet’s unquiet ghost, Brinton reminds us of the transparency of our contemporary mores so that we see through to Baudelaire’s genius, to his insistent sense of mortality in its Romantic eroticism and corruption. To understand the poet “tranced in envy” at the antics of these corpse-like erotics is to glimpse a form of compassion, of pity for the human condition. This strange and haunting quality is there at every turn of Brinton’s Baudelaire.’ — KELVIN CORCORAN