Crossing the Line

Note: Nearest tube Old Street. Take exit 1 out of Old Street station and walk up City Road, turning right into Shepherdess Walk at The Eagle. The William IV is a couple of minutes up the road, on the left.

Laurie Duggan's The Epigrams of Martial is a new and revised edition of the book published by Scripsi in 1989. Peter Craven describes Duggan's MARTIAL as "sensuous, streamlined, and thoroughly unsavoury" and Hugh Kenner called the translations "remarkable." Poet August Kleinzahler contributed an Afterword to this edition.

Susana Gardner’s [lapsed insel weary]: "As the title suggests this is a sequence of articulations on the enduring themes of loss, separation, and messy love: love is always messy. But Gardner does not indulge in the easy clichés of introspection or confession: here she conjures up an hypnotic, somnambulistic symphony of exquisite desolation. 'No man is an island' wrote John Donne but Gardner knows that is only a half truth, especially if you are a woman. Against a backdrop of the sea the breaking waters of waves and birth crash through these pages with a contradictory melancholic joy. Her island is inescapable but it has a bird and it is shot through with the vitality of colour and the colour of tenacious life. Disturbingly beautiful." --Geraldine Monk

London Bridge, Simon Smith’s fourth collection of poetry, is an accessible, funny and immediate book of poems about life in the City amidst the contingent camera-shake and confusions of the everyday. The book concentrates on the experience of living in London – a book which is accessible, contemporary and sassy.

That’s right – sassy.

Time: 7:30pm