7pm (7.30pm start) - 9pm
Admission £5 on the door
Join us for the exciting launch of new Bloodaxe poetry collection The Gaelic Garden of the Dead by Kirsten Norrie (MacGillivray). This is an ambitious trilogy of dreamscape based on the ancient Gaelic alphabet of trees in which Mary Queen of Scots walks the boards of execution and a numinous collection of Highland rites and rituals is summoned from the fe or corpse measuring stick to the horse healers.
Published by Bloodaxe in the UK and Red Hen, Los Angeles in the US, her work has appeared on the BBC and in most UK poetry journals. Following two previous collections, The Last Wolf of Scotland, Red Hen 2017 and The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless, Bloodaxe, 2016, this latest collection further confirms Norrie’s position as one of the UK’s most ambitious and original poets.
The evening will include readings from poets Chris McCabe, Jeremy Reed, Niall McDevitt and A.R. Thompson.
Chris McCabe’s work crosses artforms and genres including fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. He was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award in 2013 and his five collections of poetry include Speculatrix (2014) and The Triumph of Cancer (2018), which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He has written the first two of a planned series of seven psychogeographic prose books about the dead poets of London Cemeteries which include the titles In the Catacombs and Cenotaph South. With Victoria Bean he is the co-editor of The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayward Publishing, 2015) and his first novel, Dedalus, a sequel to Ulysses, was published by Henningham Family Press in 2018 and is longlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize. He works as the National Poetry Librarian.
Jeremy Reed, born on a chip of rock off the French Normandy coast, has been for decades Britain’s most dynamic, adventurous, controversial and futures poet. Called by the Independent ‘British poetry’s glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie’, his poetry, fiction and performances of his work are singularly inimitable in their opposition to grey mainstream poetry. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, winning prestigious literary prizes like the Somerset Maugham Award, and was on his coming to live in London in the 1980s patronised by the artist Francis Bacon.
A.R. Thompson is a writer based in Oxford. He has led poetry walks in London on the Modernists for the International Times and New River Press, curated and read in London and Edinburgh and was writer-in-residence with 'The Parlour Collective'. He is currently at Kellogg College, Oxford University, studying for an MSt in Creative Writing and published in MONK and the New River Press Yearbook 2019: WHEN THEY START TO LOVE YOU AS A MACHINE YOU SHOULD RUN.
Irish poet Niall McDevitt lives in West London. He is the author of three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo ( International Times, 2013) and Firing Slits: Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016). His work appears in Wretched Strangers – an anthology of non-UK born writers; Urban Shamanism – poets from north, west, south and east London; Diamond Cutters – poets in Britain, America and Oceania; and the STRIKE! Anthology. His book Babylon (a neoliberal theodicy) is forthcoming from New River Press