About
Dare-Gale Press is not currently open for submissions. Please do not send unsolicited manuscripts.
If you wish to write to us please use the contact form.
Dare-Gale Press is an independent small press founded in 2015. The first title to be published was Mary Borden's Poems of Love and War, launched at the Wimbledon Book Fest. This was the first of an inaugural series of collections by poets who saw active service in the First World War, but not with a gun in their hand. Their role was to save life, rather than to take it. Other poets in the series include Laurence Binyon, who served as a medical orderly at a hospital for French soldiers near Verdun. Counter-Wave: Poetry of Rescue in the First World War is the first anthology of its kind, featuring ten volunteer humanitarian workers who saw front-line service, including E.E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway and John Masefield.
In 2022 Dare-Gales Press launched a series of contemporary poetry pamphlets, featuring well-known poets as well as new voices.
Dare-Gale books are distributed by Central Books.
We are committed to a carbon-neutral and environmentally-conscious model of publishing. We limit our carbon use as much as possible, and offset what we do use by funding the planting of trees in urban areas. We work with environmentally-conscious printers and only use paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). We limit waste by not over-printing: our aim is to sell all the books we print.
Dare-Gale Press takes its name from the opening lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem, 'The Caged Skylark':
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells…
Since at least the time of the great Troubadour poet Bernart de Ventadorn, the skylark has been a symbol of both lyric poetry and what Hopkins calls 'man's mounting spirit', and its desire for freedom. For Shelley, the skylark is a 'blythe spirit' who teaches the poet to sing. Coleridge 'translated' the skylark's exuberant song as: 'I love my Love, and my Love loves me!'. We use it as a symbol of the freedom of spirit that we are looking for in the poetry we publish.
Dare-Gale Press is run by Paul O'Prey and Pilar Garcia. We are based in Brighton and Hove on the south coast of England.
For any further information, please get in touch.
