Sally Castle – illustratör

If you regularly visit the Reading Central Library, or shop in King’s Walk, or cross the bridge from John Lewis to the Oracle, or live in Mallard Row, Brook Street West or Trelleck Road in Reading, you will know a little of the Holy Brook. Thousand of people use the crossroads at Jackson’s Corner without knowing that there’s running water a few feet down. But where does it start? Is it a natural stream or man-made? What is it for? What was it called when the Abbey was still functioning? This unique and secretive waterway has been hurrying through and under Reading for many centuries. Adam Sowan has written the fullest account yet of the Brook’s topography, history, archaeology and mythology; Sally Castle’s map shows the places where you can follow its banks; and Peter Hay’s illustrations evoke its unique character.

In recognition of the town’s long history and rich heritage, the poems gathered in this anthology celebrate Reading’s connections with poetry, both past and present. Written by poets who live or have lived in the area, many of the poems are set in Reading and the Thames Valley and make reference to poems and writers associated with the town over the years: Coleridge in flight from his university debts, Rimbaud’s association with a language school in King’s Road, Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’, Jane Austen’s only formal schooling, and Dickens’s many visits to the town. The anthology is also an essential introduction to reading poetry. Each poet has provided his or her own account of their relation to the anthology’s theme, their inspiration, their muse. The poets represented are Paul Bavister, Adrian Blamires, David Cooke, Jane Draycott, Claire Dyer, John Froy, A.F. Harrold, Ian House, Wendy Klein, Gill Learner, Allison McVety, Kate Noakes, Victoria Pugh, Peter Robinson, Lesley Saunders, Susan Utting, and Jean Watkins. Specially commissioned illustrations from Sally Castle round off this refreshingly approachable collection.

Reading has many places of worship serving a number of faiths and sects. This book describes and tells the stories of ten of the more historically and architecturally interesting ones: the three parish churches founded in medieval times; Greyfriars, which was in secular use for many years; Roman Catholic St James's, Pugin's first ecclesiastical work; Victorian edifices serving a rapidly growing population; nonconformist and dissenting chapels; and the Friends' Meeting House, where both Huntley and Palmer are buried. Further chapters cover churches in the suburbs and the rise of other faiths, some of which worship in former Christian buildings. A variety of architectural styles are revealed, including medieval gothic, classical, neo-gothic and neo-Norman, Moorish-Byzantine, and Islamic. There is work by famous architects, including Waterhouse, Bodley and Comper. Inside the churches are some notable and curious fixtures and fittings: a rood screen from a cathedral in Birmingham, carved stonework from Reading Abbey, and a monument to a mathematician adorned with the five regular geometrical solids. Illustrated by Sally Castle with strikingly atmospheric linocut prints of the buildings and embellished with exquisite drawings by Martin Andrews, this book sheds new light on our often overlooked ecclesiastical heritage.

Creator of the lightly fictionalized region of Wessex, where Reading features as Aldbrickham, Thomas Hardy is naturally considered one of England’s most topographically sensitive authors. In this new collection of his poems, each selected for its relation to a specific locale, and finely illustrated by Sally Castle, Hardy’s imagination appears most intensely engaged, as Peter Robinson’s afterword explores, by interrelations of personal experience and the circumstances in which it happens to befall. So ‘After a Romantic Day’, one of the poems gathered here, proposes that, where human passions are involved, a ‘bald steep cutting, rigid, rough, / And moon-lit, was enough / For poetry of place…’

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

The first edition of English Nettles brought together poems Peter Robinson began writing on his return to England after many years living in Japan. The twenty-three works, evocatively illustrated by Sally Castle, show the poet’s ability to catch at fleeting landscapes and moments as, discovering Reading, he reacquainted himself with his native land. The poems celebrate his collaboration with the artist in their tribute to the place in which he came to settle. This beautifully redesigned new edition brings the book back into print, and includes an additional poem and illustration.Running through their lines like the town’s two arteries are oblique reflections on the meaning of home, the nature of money, work, love, death, and parenthood. Approachable yet inexhaustible, Peter Robinson’s poetry welcomes readers and promises rewards that can be kept.A Two Rivers Press illustrated classic.‘… the finest poet of his generation’ – PN Review ‘Robinson is at his best when describing the strangeness of marginalia such as … “a creosoted shed / with ivy bursting through its boards” … where time is distorted and realigned like perspectives in a mirror so that a return “home” feels as strange as being in a foreign country’ – Poetry London ‘… a major English poet’ – Poetry Review

“Greetings! I’m Matilda -- you may know me as Empress Matilda -- and I was so nearly the first Queen of England. William the Conqueror was my grandfather, and I should have succeeded my father, King Henry I. For many years I ruled in the southern counties of England and came very close to seizing the crown back from my cousin, Stephen. However, it was not to be. This is my story.”So begins this colourfully illustrated book telling the story of Empress Matilda, a medieval feminist who fought to gain her rightful place as Queen of England.With a foreword by Lindy Grant, Professor Emerita of Medieval History at the University of Reading, and an expert in Kingship and Queenship in the High Middle Ages.