Looking back on Leicester's Shindigs

Jonathan Taylor has posted a short piece looking back at Leicester Shindigs, 2010-2017. It was a great pleasure to read there on several occasions, and an even greater one to attend regularly. I hope it will return in some form, but whatever happens, it did a great job of giving both new and established poets a regular forum, and huge thanks are due to Jane Commane, Matt Nunn, and Maria and Jonathan Taylor, who fronted it and did all the behind-the-scenes work that made it such a success.

Riverrun, by Alan Baker

Knives, Forks & Spoons Press are publishing Alan Baker's new collection Riverrun, a sequence of sonnets about the River Trent. As the blurb from Robert Sheppard says, Baker (a fine poet who deserves to be widely read) is following in a long tradition of poets taking rivers as their inspiration.

Full details are here, or you can read four of the poems at Stride.

TS Eliot Prize shortlist announced

The shortlist for this year's TS Eliot Prize has been announced – there are five debuts on the list, alongside the likes of Nick Laird and Sean O'Brien. It's good to see the judges including such a diverse range of work, although the list is dominated by the larger publishers, with a very notable exception – Fiona Moore's The Distal Point is published by the very wonderful HappenStance.

Oswald's Book of Hours

Litter has an interesting review of Steve Ely's collection Oswald's Book of Hours, from Smokestack Books. It's one that I'd really like to catch up with, partly because Ely's a very fine poet whose work I've enjoyed before, and partly because of the subject matter.

I just started reading The King in the North, by Max Adams, about Oswald, 7th century king of Northumbria and saint, reminding myself of what I've long forgotten since studying the period at university. The two books ought to complement each other rather well.