Fainlight, Briggs, Brandon

Contact: Box Office: 0117 917 2300/1, www.arnolfini.org.uk

Ruth Fainlight is one of Britain’s most distinguished poets. Her first poetry collection, Cages, was published in 1966. Born in New York City in 1931 to an English father and an American mother, she has lived in England since the age of 15. Her New & Collected Poems covers work written over 50 years, drawing on over a dozen books as well as a whole new collection, translations and libretti. A lifetime of writing has included friendships with both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (the two were young mothers, as well as writers, together), Robert Graves, Jane and Paul Bowles, and many other poets and novelists. She was married to the writer Alan Sillitoe. Her poems distil her quiet, passionate vision into poems that shine bright and clear as the moon, rooted in the everyday, yet also very much of the spirit.

David Briggs is a wonderfully entertaining, highly popular Bristol-based poet. The Method Men, published this year, is his much anticipated first collection, a taut, deft and elegant book, featuring poems previously published in magazines such as Magma, Poetry Review, Iota and Poetry Wales, and in small groups of three or four in significant anthologies, including Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets. David’s work is concerned with the individual and often peculiar strategies we employ in attempting to navigate our way through the everyday world.

Patrick Brandon is a Bristol-based artist and poet. He studied painting at Norwich School of Art, and has exhibited regularly in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. A Republic of Linen is his first collection. Whether they tell of rising late and reluctantly from a warm bed, or revisit the deceptive simplicity of childhood, or take us wandering around a cold dissecting lab, these poems are about watching and waiting. With an eye for the detail and tilt of daily life, Patrick guides us from bedroom to studio, through the distorted terrain that lies between what we covet and what we get. Mostly his poems are about love.

Price: £7.00

Time: 8:00pm