An evening of poetry at Kenilworth Arts Festival

A week on Friday (September 16th), this rather splendid event is taking place as part of the Kenilworth Arts Festival. David Morley will be joined by Sarah Howe, Luke Kennard, Jo Bell, Claire Trevien and Jonathan Edwards at the Talisman Theatre for an evening of poetry. Follow the link for details of how to book tickets.

Winter Wordsmiths

Following on from that dip into the Wordsmiths & Co archives, there are a couple of winter Wordsmiths & Co shows coming up. starting tomorrow night (November 14th) at Warwick Arts Centre at 7.45pm, when the guests will be poets Tony Walsh aka Longfella poet, Luke Kennard, Helen Calcutt and Al Hutchins.

Wordsmiths & Co is back at Warwick on December 2nd, when the guests are poets Salena Godden, Helen Mort, Claire Trévien and Ben Norris. Sadly, work's going to get in the way of me getting along to either of these, but I recommend them very highly. Quite apart from the excellent poets, the whole format is a really new spin on the traditional reading format, with interviews as well as poems.

Wordsmiths & Co is a collaboration between Nine Arches Press and Apples and Snakes.

Friday night at the Friends Meeting House

The weekend just gone was (unusually for me) a frantically busy one, so I'm only now finally getting round to gathering my thoughts about Friday night's Nine Arches Press Poet Tea at the Friends Meeting House, Leicester.

I was recently trying to get my bookcases into some sort of order, and it struck me how many of Mario Petrucci's pamphlets and books I've accumulated over the years. I'd never, until Friday, heard him read, but it was well worth the wait. His reading, from his Nine Arches collection anima, was astonishingly intense, with a lot of that stillness that I've talked about before, with readers such as David Morley. It was an electrifying start to the evening, and it sent me back to the collection over the weekend.

Claire Trevien's The Shipwrecked House, published by Penned In The Margins earlier this year, has been longlisted for the Guardian's Best First Book Award. It was easy to hear why. The poems are subtly off-kilter, giving an unsettling edge to what can at first feel like familiar scenes and situations, and Claire's delivery of them was assured and quietly animated. I look forward to reading the collection.

Alistair Noon read largely new work, before closing with a number of poems from his Nine Arches collection Earth Records, and what both have in common is a willingness to range freely across geographical and stylistic divides that's refreshing and frequently exhilarating. He lives in Berlin, so visits to the UK are relatively rare, but if you get a chance to hear him read, don't miss it - it's hard to think of anyone else writing in quite this way at the moment.

I read from The Elephant Tests, and tried the book's longest poem, Ravens, Newborough Warren, for the first time. I was helped out hugely by Charles Lauder, who provided one of the two voices for the piece - I'd been wondering how to differentiate the two away from the page, but this seemed to work well.

Hopefully there'll be more Poet Teas to come - it was a pleasure and privilege to be part of the first one.

A great way to start a weekend

Next Friday (25th October), Nine Arches Press is staging a special Poet-Tea at the Quaker Meeting House on Queen's Road, Leicester, from 7pm to 9pm. 

Tickets are £5 and cab be booked here - they include tea and cake as well as a wealth of live poetry, making it a thoroughly civilised way to start your weekend. It's all compered by Nine Arches Press editor, Jane Commane, and the poets who'll be reading are Claire Trevien, Alistair Noon, Mario Petrucci and myself.

Here's some more info on three very fine readers - all you need to know about me is that you really don't want to get stuck behind me in the cake queue.

Claire Trévien is an Anglo-Breton poet. Her first collection, The Shipwrecked House (Penned in the Margins, 2013), was longlisted in the Guardian First Book Award. Her poetry appears in numerous magazines and anthologies including Best British Poetry 2012 and The Forward Book of Poetry 2013. She edits Sabotage Reviews, Verse Kraken, and Penning Perfumes.

Alistair Noon was born in 1970 and grew up in Aylesbury. Besides time spent in Russia and China, he has lived in Berlin since the early nineties, where he works as a translator. His poetry and translations from German and Russian have appeared in nine chapbooks from small presses. Earth Records (Nine Arches Press) is his first full-length collection.

Mario Petrucci's work is “vivid, generous and life-affirming” (Envoi). His most recent poems, inspired by Black Mountain and hailed as "modernist marvels" (Poetry Book Society), embrace contemporary issues of searing social and personal relevance via a distinctive combination of innovation and humanity. Whether exploring the tragedies of Chernobyl (Heavy Water, 2004) or immersing himself in heart-rending invention (i tulips, 2010), Petrucci aspires to "Poetry on a geological scale” (Verse). His latest collection is anima (Nine Arches Press, 2013).