Poetry on the upsurge at Edinburgh book festival
A few years ago Write Out Loud was in Edinburgh for the Fringe and the book festival – and was a little disappointed at the amount of poetry on offer at the latter. It is fair to say things have changed since then. Many of the biggest names in poetry will be appearing at this year’s Edinburgh book festival running from 12-28 August. They include Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Don Paterson, Jackie Kay, Paul Muldoon, Gillian Clarke, Daljit Nagra, Liz Lochhead, John Burnside, Sinead Morrissey, Roger McGough, Imtiaz Dharker, Michael Longley, Hollie McNish, and Luke Wright.
You want more? Then how about Kei Miller, Paul Farley, Kayo Chingonyi, Fiona Sampson, Michael Symmons Roberts, Lorna Goodison, Jim Carruth, WN Herbert, Andy Jackson, Rachel Boast, Jemima Foxtrot, Iona Lee, Sabrina Mahfouz, and Sophia Walker.
One of the events that caught our eye was the former national poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, launching her new collection Zoology, and reading alongside Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison, whose Collected Poems has just been published.
Claire Askew and Russell Jones, who have put together the anthology Umbrellas of Edinburgh, will be joined by some of the book's contributors including Harry Giles, Marjorie Lotfi Gill, Jane Yolan and Finola Scott.
Douglas Dunn will be presenting his first new collection for 16 years, The Noise of a Fly, while in I Wandered Lonely as a Crowd Luke Wright will be offering a guide through 350 topical years of poets laureate – from Dryden to Duffy – as contemporary poets Kayo Chingonyi, William Letford, Jenny Lindsay, Richard Osmond and Deanna Rodger perform their work and make a bid for a laureateship of their own choosing. The audience gets the final say.
