Cirrus@Austlit

'The achievements of the poets who started publishing in the early 1980s in Australia have tended to be overshadowed by those of the generation immediately prior to them. Rochford Press was started in 1983 by Mark Roberts and Adam Aitken, catching the tail-end of the little mag boom of the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s it was the imprint of the poetry little mag P76 and also published four collections (by Mark Roberts, Rob Finlayson, Les Wicks and Dipti Saravanamuttu). The press wound down activity in the early 1990s, and nothing more was published until Rochford Street Review started up in 2011, a neat demonstration that poetry makes its own time. Alongside the Review, which will shortly publish its 29th issue, there have been a handful of publications, mostly retrospective: the ‘best of’ compilation drawn from Rae Desmond Jones’ little mag Your Friendly Fascist, and the wonderful festschrift for Cornelis Vleeskens. More recently, with Linda Adair as publisher, the press has focused on current poetry, specifically a series of chapbooks that includes the two books under review: Sarah St Vincent Welch’s OPEN and Juan Garrido Salgado’s Cuando Fui Clandestino / When I Was Clandestine.' (Introduction)