Biography
The poet Stuart Mills (1940–2006) founded the Tarasque Press in 1964, assisted by Simon Cutts in 1965, and, with Martin Parnell, opened the Trent Bookshop and organised the Nottingham Poetry Festival (1965), establishing the city as a regional centre of avant-garde publishing. The word ‘Tarasque’ had been chosen by Stuart Mills because it denotes a fabulous beast, said to have once terrorised the Valley of the Rhône. In 1966, the Tarasque Press was among the first to participate in the process of collaboration with teh artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) producing a number of Finlay’s poem-prints and booklets. Eleven issues of Tarasque were published between 1965 and 1971 (nos. 1–11/12).
