A community of poets will be reading on Zoom at the launch of dog, a posthumous collection of poems by Grant Tarbard, who died last year at the age of 43. Poets reading from 7.30pm on Wednesday 8 March include Adam Horovitz, Bethany W Pope, Antony Owen, Andy Jackson, George Szirtes, Kate Garret, Daniel Sluman, and Rishi Dastidar. The event will be hosted by Helen Ivory, Martin Figura and Andrew McDonnell of Gatehouse Press.

In his introduction to dog, George Szirtes says: “Dog is about the sound and fury of living with severe physical limitations while possessing an excellent, ambitious and well-fed mind, a wild yet controlled imagination, a huge energetic spirit and a great gift for poetry. It is, in many ways, a legacy book, in that it engages the full range of his voice and leaves us with a clear sense of his power as a poet.”

Grant Tarbard was a poet and artist, former editor of The Screech Owl magazine, co-founder of Resurgant Press, a reviewer, and an editorial assistant for Three Drops From A Cauldron. His previous poetry collections were As I Was Pulled Under the Earth (Lapwing Publications), Yellow Wolf (Writing Knights Press), Loneliness is the Machine that Drives the World (Platypus Press) and Rosary of Ghosts (Indigo Dreams).

Talking about Rosary of Ghosts in an interview in 2017 he said: “Really, it’s about my stroke in December 2012. Let me take you through a brief history of my time — I had dialysis at 19; my nerves were shot and my bones were almost crumbling … and I had to use a wheelchair throughout all of my twenties. I had a badly needed transplant at 33 and then — miraculous hallelujah — I was walking. Then I had the stroke two months later, as God is cruel, and it was back into the wheelchair.”

You can sign up for the event via Eventbrite