Acclaimed poets Jeremy Clarke, Matthew Francis, Gill Gregory, and Michael Lee Rattigan will be reading from published and new work. Hosted by Rufus Books Publishing.
Doors: 7pm.
A Spanish stonemason asks: when is a stone properly placed? And he answers his own question: when my impatience to once more readjust it has vanished. Jeremy Clarke writes like a Spanish stonemason. His poems are houses, bridges, towers ... Incredibly beautiful, marvellous, so accurate and unexpected, and at the same time simple. Deeply impressive. I salute it. ❧ John Berger
The way in which Matthew Francis navigates through the strictures of his form, doubling and tripling meanings as he goes, is not just astonishingly virtuosic but moving: he is a poetic Houdini, escaping into a locked box in order to liberate his subject self. ❧ David C. Ward, PN Review
Gill Gregory’s well-defined voice relies on melting down time and space to fashion a fluid wakefulness as it usually only occurs in dreams. Clearly there is an ambitious mind behind these poems, keen to explore complex inner worlds that can barely be expressed ... the result is utterly exciting. ❧ Tears in the Fence
Michael Lee Rattigan is seeking to pinpoint that ‘other’ voice, for everything that he writes it seems exists only to advance silence, or at least our unmediated access to it—while consciousness is no more than a fine vessel of flesh and blood stretched over the diaphanous musculature of each word; for this poet does not produce a merely verbal language, no, rather he is writing the syntax of listening, the anti-aesthetics of un-naming and sucking back into the lungs the protean impulse of a visible mind. ❧ Paul Stubbs, The Black Herald