Joan Siegel has poems in Raritan

Two new poems by Joan Siegel appear in Raritan. I was very pleased to find a copy of Raritan in my PO Box with two of Joan's fine poems in the back.

You can buy her book Hyacinth for the Soul from Deerbrook Editions web site now using a secure PayPal shopping cart and you don't need a PayPal account to do so. Just go to the catalog link on our web site and help to support our authors. Joan's book is a full collection of excellent poems.

demonstration on the iron hand press

Here is a home-style movie of the basic operation of the Washington style handpress, the R.Hoe & Company platen press, the Press at Deerbrook.






I know the lighting is terrible, but here is another view of the inking to proof a test run of a cut from the operators side. Showing here the basic operation of the printing press much as it was done for centuries on this type of press or the common press of colonial times since the development of movable type by Gutenberg. The steps are here done by one person, what normally would have been done by two, one person inking and one pulling, the basics are the same and by experienced workers in colonial times could yield up to 200 impressions an hour.

Of course inking methods were different before the development of rollers in the nineteenth century. The inking was done with "balls", leather covered padding attached to wood handles. A pair of these round hand-held pads were rolled in a twisting motion on the ink stone and then over the form of type. It required skill and sensitivity of a similar nature as using the roller.

This is the basic principle of "relief" printing or "letterpress". A form is "locked up" on the bed of the press, the "tympan and frisket" carries the paper while the entire form is moved under the platen and the bar is pulled lowering the platen, pressing the paper onto the form. Usually the paper used in this operation was a dampened handmade paper. Most incunabula of rare libraries and fine press books were printed in this manner.









The common press as shown in Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing a Dover reprint of the 1684 edition. Note the inking "balls" or brayers hanging on the left side of the press with their mull or pestle shaped handles.

Listen to Djelloul read

This video is courtesy of Brent Robison and Djelloul Marbrook. Well done and a pleasure to hear the voice of the poet reading from his new book Brushstrokes and glance.

Djelloul Marbrook's new book Brushstrokes and glances is on the Valparaiso Poetry Review list of Recommended Books: volume 12.

They are looking for reviewers.

Here is one of my favorites.



Review: Djelloul Marbrook’s Brushstrokes and glances

Teresa Giordano
December 8, 2010


I envy Djelloul Marbrook and I am grateful to him. I envy his ability to inhabit a painting, to leave a dark state of mind and enter a world that transcends our own sometimes frightening often banal world. I’m grateful that his talent and grace grant me access to that world through his book of poems Brushstrokes and glances. Art for Mr. Marbrook – particularly painting – is not merely a collection of objects to be admired. Art is a place that beckons; paintings are to be visited – as alive and dimensional as a mountaintop, a city street, or church or temple. As in those places we can order our lives in front of a great work, find meaning in brushstrokes. As he says in Picasso’s bull: We need a museum to show us/we can unbind our captive lives. Djelloul Marbrook’s triumph is not only that he can experience art the way most of us cannot it is also that he can articulate his vision and share it in this beautifully crafted book of poems. Brushstrokes and glances is an invitation to “lift the curse of containment” (see A naming spree). It is an invitation well worth accepting.