This event on 20th November 2013 at 19:30 has past.

This event series is no longer running. It last took place on 16th September 2015 at 19:30.

20th November 2013 at 19:30

Our special guest reader for November is the fantastic Gaia Holmes, and the event will see the compering debut of Lesley Connors.


Gaia Holmes is a West Yorkshire-born poet and a graduate of Huddersfield University’s English with Creative Writing BA, and has previously made a living as a busker, a cleaner, a gallery attendant, an oral historian, a lollypop lady, a poet in residence at Bradford Library and Halifax festival, a freelance writer and Creative Writing lecturer. As well as being a familiar face on the local poetry scene, Gaia Holmes is also known nationally. She has read at literary festivals throughout Britain and beyond. Her poem ‘Claustrophobia’ was highly commended in the ‘Best Individual Poem’ category of the Forward Poetry Prize, 2007 and ‘A Homesick Truckie in the Algarve’ was the featured poem in Frieda Hughes’ weekly literary column in The Times (May 2007). Her debut poetry collection, Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed, was published by Comma Press in 2006. Her 2nd collection, Lifting The Piano With One Hand, (Comma Press), was published in September, 2013.
Praise for ‘Lifting the piano with one hand’:
‘In this, her much-awaited second collection, Gaia Holmes deepens the distinctive voice which made Dr James Graham's Celestial Bed such an impressive debut. With frailty and ferocity, she finds the sacred and discordant in the everyday. Empty tea-cups and beds are brimful of loss. Sex is sweet, sour and subversive. All this in a style which is as accessible as it is challenging. An engaging collection from a poet going from strength to strength.’- Cathy Galvin

‘Like the narrator of her title poem, Gaia Holmes performs elegant feats, her language effortless and remarkable. This is a haunting but often witty collection, the poems alive to both ‘the sweet and the sour / moments of life.’ – Helen Mort
‘Gaia Holmes has a wonderfully distinctive voice, not like other poets. More like incantation or witchcraft – these poems are spells, taking the most ordinary and mundane of things, including jokes and sadness, and working some metamorphosis on them, so they shine like stars – tiny but brilliant.’ - Sara Maitland
‘Gaia Holmes became my favourite contemporary female poet the moment I read her potent, enchanting art. A wordsmith chef mixing the magic of concrete and sensory with the imaginative , Gaia Holmes transforms the Everyday into the exotic and becomes a young Lady Prospero, a able to make eiderdown moonlight or lift a neglected piano to the skylight.’ -Joan Jobe Smith, Founding Editor of Pearl and Bukowski Review, Long Beach, California, USA