Marsden, Yorkshire, is a hotbed of poetic endeavour – much of it supported or launched by Write Out Loud since our setting up there in 2010 - including a long-running monthly poetry night, Marsden the Poetry Village initiative (the one that put poetry books in pubs and cafés) and ten years of the iconic Poetry Jam at Marsden’s famous jazz festival. Perhaps we should mention, too, a certain Simon Armitage whose home village this is.

In recent years the friends of Marsden Library have curated a popular plethora of readings and launches by local and not-so-local writers, the latest being the launch of Tim Taylor’s Life Times poetry collection published by Maytree Press, on 28th April in the library.

Life Times is Tim’s second collection, comprising poems about human life: its phases, from birth, through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and middle age to the final years and beyond; and its pivotal moments: the shifts and connections between one phase and another, and the events that can change its course irrevocably. These themes are explored from a wide range of perspectives and through different forms and styles of poetry.

Born in North Staffordshire in 1960 and brought up near the gritstone hills of the southern Peak District, in 2001 Tim found a home from home among the northern Peak District gritstone hills of Meltham, near Marsden, where he and wife Rosa have lived ever since.

He has published two novels, a book of philosophy, some 85 poems in magazines such as Acumen, Orbis and Pennine Platform, on poetry websites and in various anthologies. Tim’s first collection, Sea Without a Shore, was published in 2019 and Life Times in March 2022, both by Maytree Press.

Tim divides his time between creative writing, academic research, and teaching in Ethics at the University of Leeds. He enjoys playing guitar and walking up hills, and is a long-standing member of Marsden Write Out Loud, as well as Holme Valley Poets and Poetry-ID.

Tickets available from here.

You can find out more about Tim here.

If you can’t make the launch, Tim’s book can be purchased here.