Love is a Battlefield: Louise Fazackerley, Nymphs & Thugs
Eight years ago, Louise Fazackerley went to a event in Wigan organised by Write Out Loud host and poet and lyricist in his own right, John Togher. Like the birth of many a performance poet, this proved to be the gateway to a whole new adventure. Since that night, she has gained a well-deserved reputation as one of the stand-out performance poets of the north. Described as “a great performer” by...
27th December 2015
Keats, celery, Luton, wallpaper: John Hegley brightens wet night in Hebden Bridge
On a rainy evening in Hebden Bridge I ventured down a side street, pushed open a forbidding door and ascended the stairs of the Trades Club. Given the history of the Calder valley I half-expected to see the ghost of Edward Thompson doing a WEA gig on the rise of the English working class, but no; it...
23rd December 2015
Don't Mention the Children: Michael Rosen, Smokestack
Until I read the blurb, I thought the title of this collection of adult poems by the former children’s laureate, Michael Rosen, might refer to hiding the content of this book from the children - or p...
2nd December 2015
Out of Everywhere 2: ed. Emily Critchley, Reality Street
One of the seminal anthologies of non-mainstream poetries of the late 1990s has to be the first Out of Everywhere anthology, edited by Maggie O’Sullivan. It’s a brilliant collection of various poetrie...
25th November 2015
Poet reaches for the sky to remember those magnificent women in their Spitfires
Diana Barnato Walker, who delivered 260 Spitfires and many twin-engined bombers during the war, was convinced she had a guardian angel, in the form of a badly-burnt pilot. Lettice Curtis ferried almo...
12th November 2015
'Visionary in a utilitarian age': John Cooper Clarke on 19th century opium eater Thomas De Quincey
Dr John Cooper Clarke, to give him his full honorary academic title, does have a certain affinity with Thomas De Quincey, 19th century author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and friend and a...
9th November 2015
True Tales of the Countryside: Deborah Alma, The Emma Press
What a treat for lovers of exuberant, lusty, warm-hearted poetry - Deborah Alma’s first collection of her own gutsy poems, plus her Anti-Stress Anthology which she uses in her guise as the Emergency P...
9th November 2015
Smoke Rising: John Seed, Shearsman
I first came across the poetry of John Seed in the anthology, A Various Art, a gathering of British experimental poets from the 1970s and 80s. I can’t say that I was struck by them, not that they were...
9th November 2015
No one gets hurt as A Firm of Poets do the business
It must be made clear at the outset that A Firm of Poets are a collective of northern-based, er, poets. It’s just that whenever I’ve heard their monicker I’ve always found myself thinking of the kind ...
7th November 2015
Play that anglo-saxophone! Michael Horovitz celebrates 35 years of Poetry Olympics
It was billed as the Poetry Olympics Enlightenment festival - and I hadn’t really known what to expect. I did know that veteran poet Michael Horovitz , who put together the Children of Albion antholog...
23rd October 2015
The poetry of lost landscapes: Tamar Yoseloff and David Harker merge text and art in Nowheres
A shared obsession with “urban detritus” and “provisional, lost landscapes” has brought poet Tamar Yoseloff and artist David Harker together, to collaborate and explore with paintings, drawings and wo...
22nd October 2015
Rhymes, Rock & Revolution: the story of performance poetry
BBC4’s look at performance poetry and its links with music opened with footage from Wholly Communion, the film of the Albert Hall gathering of 1965, with Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Adrian ...
21st October 2015
'Both my parents were on my exam syllabus' - Frieda Hughes
The level-headed and even-handed testimony of Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, stood out in a recent BBC4 programme, Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death, part of the BBC’s Poetr...
18th October 2015
A Murmuration: David Cooke, Two Rivers Press
David Cooke is well known to and appreciated by regulars on Write Out Loud. He started out as a winner of a Gregory award, given to young poets, and has become a much-published poet who nevertheless c...
9th October 2015
Multimedia and the message: Zones of Avoidance brings home unavoidable truths
An award-winning , multimedia poetry production is being performed in a short run at London’s Cockpit theatre – and I recommend that you see it, if you possibly can. Zones of Avoidance by Maggie Sawk...
3rd October 2015
Zygote Poems: Richard Thomas, Cultured Llama
In the title poem Richard Thomas opens this collection by introducing the “poppy seed” that will become his daughter, Emmeline, “making itself at home”. The size comparison of a six- or seven-week foe...
2nd October 2015
Cherry Pie: Hollie McNish, Burning Eye Books
Published by Burning Eye under her pen name of Hollie Poetry, and inspired by her grandparents’ advice on newspapers, war, sex and tinned cherries, Cherry Pie is the second collection of poems by Holl...
30th September 2015
The Nailmakers' Daughters: Offa's Press
The latest offering from Offa’s Press brings together the work of three poets from the West Midlands – Emma Purshouse, Iris Rhodes and Marion Cockin - who share with us their observations and memories...
28th September 2015
Arguments Yard: Attila the Stockbroker, Cherry Red
Attila the Stockbroker is celebrating his 35th year of being Attila, and doing it in style with an autobiography plus an extensive and ongoing book launch tour. Released on 3 September by Cherry Red B...
21st September 2015
The Beauty: Jane Hirshfield, Bloodaxe
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist and translator born in New York City in 1953. She has worked widely as an academic of creative writing and poetry and received many awards, including bein...
17th September 2015
Schooldays: Paper Swans Press
Schooldays is a new collection of poetry and flash fiction from Paper Swans, a recently launched, small independent press. The contents are accessible, vivid and thought-provoking and offer up fresh i...
14th September 2015
Woodchip Anaglypta and Nicotined Artex Ceilings: JB Barrington
This updated, 2015 version of Woodchip Anaglypta and Nicotined Artex Ceilings, a collection of poems written and performed by Salford-born JB Barrington in an award-winning show, includes angry poems ...
13th September 2015
Small Hands: Mona Arshi, Liverpool University Press
There is an obvious motif of hands running through Mona Arshi’s wonderful debut collection, Small Hands - hands and palms that have “dents” and “pleats”. Rain crops up many times in the poems, too, of...
15th July 2015
Dark Islands: Tom Chivers, Test Centre
In this collection of poems Tom Chivers, the innovative publisher of Penned in the Margins, transmits with often dazzling language a vivid and troubling vision in which the old and modern Thames takes...
13th July 2015
The Pity: first world war anthology, Poetry Society
This Poetry Society anthology, published in 2014, was an initiative to celebrate the centenary of the Great War. They chose four poets who would represent different "poetics and perspectives" to write...
1st July 2015
The power of Yeats: BBC's Fergal Keane on the poet he takes on his travels
A multi-award-winning BBC foreign correspondent, whose parents were both actors and whose father knew Louis MacNeice, drew fresh resonances from WB Yeats’ ‘Easter 1916’ on Wednesday night when he read...
25th June 2015
Imagined Sons: Carrie Etter, Seren
Discussing the topic of lyric poetry on an Arvon course last year, I heard someone say that all lyric is about the absence of the loved one.
True or not, I found this idea an arresting and fruitful...
15th June 2015
Thought-Apples: Bert Flitcroft, Offa's Press
The title is apt; former English teacher and Midlands poet Bert Flitcroft has put a lot of thought, and indeed thoughts, into these poems. An insight may be gained from ‘Forbidden Fruit’; its content ...
14th June 2015
Meeting up with Muldoon: Manchester's Poets and Players competition winners
What a great return to the newly-extended Whitworth art gallery for Mancheser's Poets and Players, where a full house heard the results of the 2015 poetry competition. Not only did we hear the winners...
8th June 2015
Zones of Avoidance: Maggie Sawkins, Cinnamon
This year’s winner of the Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry was the former poet laureate, Andrew Motion, for his work based on interviews with soldiers returning from Afghanistan. The previous y...
21st May 2015
Avant-garde poetry in the home counties fails to pull in the crowds
You wouldn’t necessarily consider Guildford to be a hotbed of avant-garde poetry. And that could be why, when 11 people took to the stage to perform Bob Cobbing’s ABC in Sound at the finale of the Sur...
14th May 2015
Taking the long view: election poetry from Live Canon
The three ballot boxes on the stage were, we were told, stuffed with poems. And the lines delivered from memory by three young actors from Live Canon poetry ensemble on the eve of polling day provided...
12th May 2015
Avant-garde poetry in the home counties fails to pull in the crowds
You wouldn’t necessarily consider Guildford to be a hotbed of avant-garde poetry. And that could be why, when 11 people took to the stage to perform Bob Cobbing’s ABC in Sound at the finale of the Sur...
11th May 2015
Meltdowns, anthropomorphic puzzles, and other surprises at The Other Room's birthday party
I see Write Out Loud’s Julian Jordon was at The Castle pub on Manchester’s Oldham Street the other night doing a review - and blow me, I was in there the following evening, this time for a birthday pa...
7th May 2015
Manchester moments: Tony Walsh sends sparks flying; Liz Berry's dialect delights
An audience of 250 packed into Manchester’s Frog and Bucket comedy club, at turns whooping and hollering, mad with laughter, and trembling in tears, as the words were made flash and dealt amongst them...
7th May 2015
Farewell to John Rylands library with readings full of illuminations
Manchester’s immensely popular music and poetry event Poets and Players is fighting back after being surprisingly snubbed by the Arts Council which has supported it for a good while. But if the organi...
3rd May 2015
Look back in anger, forward in hope: poets mix it with politics in election anthology
The question of anger in political poetry was raised at the launch of an anthology aimed at encouraging people to vote, in one of London’s most popular poetry venues, the Betsey Trotwood pub in Farrin...
22nd April 2015
More Bees Bigger Bonnets: Steve Pottinger, Ignite
More Bees Bigger Bonnets is Steve Pottinger’s fourth collection of poems, and according to publisher Ignite Books, his best yet. A bold claim? We shall see.
Born and bred in the West Midlands, he h...
4th April 2015
Far from a comfort zone: Maggie Sawkins on a scary journey, and the friends she found along the way
The winner of the Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry will be announced in a few days’ time. Meanwhile on Saturday night last year’s winner, Maggie Sawkins, launched Zones of Avoidance, a collecti...
2nd April 2015
Not retro but metro: Write Out Loud Sale displays its range of poetic styles
I arrived at Write Out Loud Sale a little shame-faced, ready to hand myself in, as it were, not having attended for a while. And, like a child, it had grown since my last visit. My!
The venue at th...
31st March 2015
The Pilgrim's Trail: Frances Spurrier, Cinnamon Press
This is a book about time and memory, about the slippages between our days and hours. It is about how nature goes on, even though we can’t, about the long collective memory we humans share which is ca...
16th March 2015
New and Selected Sorrows: Goran Simic, Smokestack
Goran Simic is a name you may well have heard of. Some of his work has been translated by this year’s TS Eliot prize winner, David Harsent. He was born in 1954 in Sarajevo, 40 years after that famou...
16th March 2015
Reflections of a tireless poet: Elaine Feinstein on Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot, and brave Russian writers
Elaine Feinstein may now be 84, but “work is my game. It’s how I play”, as she says in the concluding poem, ‘Death and the Lemon Tree’, in her latest collection, Portaits, a series of acute, lively vi...
6th March 2015
One Evening in October I Rowed out on the Lake: Tua Forsström, trans. David McDuff, Bloodaxe
A brief sojourn in Finland is enough to teach the observer that the country is vast and largely uninhabited, for much of the year buried under ice and snow. Impossible then, for human beings not to be...
4th March 2015
Short of Breath: Vivien Jones, Cultured Llama
Vivien Jones lives on the north Solway shore in Scotland, and this is her second collection of poetry. Short of Breath has no overarching theme, and encompasses some subjects that are perhaps predicta...
22nd February 2015
Soundscapes, psychogeography, and a peach of a poem at The Other Room
I thought it was time for another visit to The Other Room in Manchester, and chose a night of very enjoyable but almost indescribable work at this welcoming home of experimental poetry. As Americans s...
19th February 2015
No need to mind your language, Mab: loose talk that's about women's lives
At the start of her set, Mab Jones seemed a little unsure of her audience, and said she probably wouldn’t perform the poem containing her “best rhyme” … the one rhyming “Venus” with “penis”. By the co...
18th February 2015
The Hard Word Box: Sarah Hesketh, Penned in the Margins
In her introduction to this collection, Sarah Hesketh quotes a care worker’s words: “When you tell this story, make sure you tell it right,” and adds that the staff member at the home in Preston was “...
14th February 2015
Out in the open: celebrating gay poetry, and its inspirations
I’ve been to a couple of the Poetry Library’s Special Edition readings before, but had never seen the place so packed. The reading, marking LGBT history month, was billed as ‘Hidden Desires, Hidden L...
12th February 2015
Last train from Marsden: Mr Armitage goes to Washington
Simon Armitage is famously from Marsden, as is Write Out Loud. I walked past his dad the other day, during my morning constitutional; and here I was attending his and Peter Oswald’s reading at the Fol...
9th February 2015
The Garden: anthology, Otley Word Feast Press
The Garden is the second book from this new small press in West Yorkshire, an anthology of rather delightful garden poems. I wouldn’t go quite so far as the editors to describe it as “stunning”, pri...
30th January 2015
Two Countries: Katrina Porteous, Bloodaxe
Porteous tells us, in the introduction to this collection, that the long poems in the book are a collage of scraps and fragments, “‘an archaeological assemblage of speech, song, litany and chant”, an...
30th January 2015
Larach: John Foggin, Ward Wood
This pamphlet collection is the result of John Foggin winning the Lumen Camden poetry competition last year with his poem ‘Camera Obscura’. The prize is a chapbook of the winner’s poetry issued by War...
13th January 2015
