Hinterland on Shindig

There's a really nice review of last Monday's Shindig by Rebecca Bird at Hinterland Journal - you can read it here. It's hard to disagree with any of her assessments of the other readers, and I'm very grateful for her comments on my own reading.

While you're at it, have a look at Hinterland more generally. Edited by Rebecca and Ian Parks, it's already featured some high-quality work from the likes of Roy Marshall and Maria Taylor, and it's on the lookout for more.

States of Independence - the best yet?

Saturday's States of Independence event at De Montfort University was arguably the best yet - certainly it seemed busier than ever.

I was only able to be there for part of the afternoon, but I did catch readings by Simon Perril and Julia Gaze, promoting their Open House chapbooks. I bought both, and very good they are too - I'll have more to say about them in a later post.

I caught up with plenty of familiar faces from Leicester, Nottingham, Birmingham and further afield - Roy Marshall, Mal Dewhirst, Alan Baker, CJ Allen, DA Prince, Mark Goodwin and Jane Commane among them - and it was nice to meet Ian Parks for the first time.

Oh, and I bought a few more books. A chapbook of translations of TH Parry-Williams from Shoestring Press is excellent, and I also picked up Shoestring's Commons, Nadia Kingsley and David Calcutt's Road Kill, from Fair Acre Press*, and a book of local history, Getting The Coal, which I've been enjoying immensely. Congratulations to all concerned on another superb event.

* Fair Acre also had a gorgeous-looking book, Shropshire's Butterflies, which ought to appeal to the natural historian every bit as much as the poetry reader. Definitely one to add to the must-buy list.

November's Leicester Shindig!

The latest Nine Arches Press and Crystal Clear Creators Leicester Shindig! takes place at The Western, 70 Western Road, Leicester LE3 0GA a week on Monday, 19th November, at 7.30pm.

The night's guests are Jo Bell, Dragan Todorovic, Ian Parks and David Cooke, and as always there'll be open mic slots available on the night.

David Cooke won a Gregory Award in 1977 and published Brueghel’s Dancers in 1984. He then stopped writing for 20 years. A retrospective collection, In the Distance, was published in 2011 by Night Publishing. A new collection, Work Horses, has just been published by Ward Wood Publishing.

Jo Bell is a former Glastonbury Poet in Residence, director of National Poetry Day — and now the UK's Canal Laureate. A boatdweller and former archaeologist, her poems are about everything from Roman forts to sex on the towpath (between ducks). Current projects include a collaboration on a sequence with Martin Malone, charting the progress of a passionate relationship.

Dragan Todorovic is a multimedia artist and author of eight books of nonfiction, poetry and fiction. He’s worked extensively in print and electronic media, in Serbia (where he was born) and in Canada (where he lived between 1995 - 2005). Little Red Transistor Radio from Trieste is his first collection of short stories.

Ian Parks is the only poet to have poems published in The TLS and The Morning Star on the same day. His latest collection is The Exile’s House (Waterloo Press) and he is currently Writing Fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Entry is free.

New Walk reading / Grace Nichols & John Agard show

Ian Parks and Alan Jenkins are reading as part of the Literary Leicester Festival this Thursday at 6pm, in the Ogden Lewis Seminar Suite in the University of Leicester's Fielding Johnson Building. Entry is free, but you need to book tickets - details are here.


Straight afterwards (well, at 7.30), you can get along to the Peter Williams Lecture Theatre in the Fielding Johnson Building for Grace Nichols' and John Agard's joint performance show Sunris and Man To Pan, which look at two iconic Caribbean metaphors of transfiguration – Carnival and Steel Pan. Further details are here.