Cath Nichols

Biography

For four years Cath Nichols co-ordinated Liverpool’s Dead Good Poets Society, but has now left to pursue an MA at Lancaster University. Cath was recorded earlier this year for the Oxfam ‘Life lines’ CD (£4.99 from your local Oxfam!), alongside national names such as Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Wendy Cope, et al. Tales of Boy Nancy is her poetry pamphlet (Driftwood, 2005) which was also produced as a short film with commissioned music, launched at the National Maritime Museum. ‘A moving account of hidden lives, both honest and sensitive’ Deryn Rees-Jones ‘These poems smell of the sea, of ropes and swilled decks, and yet they subvert our sense of what is normal, disrupt some of the orthodoxies we tend to cling to…. Shining through these well-made poems is something intensely humane… people are caught in in-between lives, on land dreaming of the sea, at sea dreaming of the land….. Ambivalence - as it is in life itself - is at the heart of Nichols’ poems; the tone is both robust and elegiac.’ Matt Simpson As well as performing at various gigs throughout the north-west - and a few further afield - Cath belongs to the incwriters client list (see www.incwriters.com), and was recently selected for the ‘Consequences of Flight’ collaborative project by The Word Hoard (www.wordhoard.co.uk ). Four of her poems were selected by the artist Victoria Haire for artworks to be exhibited during the 2006 Liverpool Biennale. Her forth-coming project examines the history of various characters associated with the Woolworth’s empire in Liverpool and New York. Subject to funding, she will collaborate with an American poet and a Welsh poet to create linked performance events for 2007… A full-length collection, My Glamorous Assistant will be published by Headland Press in 2007.

Samples

Fear of Falling A raw egg was placed gently in the carriage. Cables were cut and the lift fell fifty-five floors. Journalists and potential tenants gathered at ground level, waiting. The lift arrived. As Frank had stated: their safety mechanisms were second to none. The egg was unbroken. NB. The Woolworth's Tower in New York was the tallest building in the world in 1913 - and people were very worried about the lifts!

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.