Sheri Benning & Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Contact: jazmine@carcanet.co.uk

A rare chance to hear two of Carcanet’s pre-eminent international poets in London: Chris Wallace-Crabbe, visiting from Australia, and Sheri Benning, visiting from Canada. Both poets will read, followed by a discussion on place in poetry, and how their native landscapes affect their work, chaired by Chris Beckett.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/carcanet-international-poets-sheri-benning-chris-wallace-crabbe-tickets-60524553569

Chris Wallace-Crabbe is a leading Australian poet and essayist, with a special interest in the visual arts. He has published more than twenty collections of poetry, including Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (Carcanet) and Afternoon in the Central Nervous System (Braziller, NY). His New and Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in 2013. The son of a pianist and a journalist, he was raised ‘to be interested in everything’. He is a Professor Emeritus at Melbourne University, and has held posts at Harvard and Ca’ Foscari, Venice. He received the Dublin Prize for Arts and Sciences in 1987, the Philip Hodgins Prize for Literature in 2002, and in 2011 the Order of Australia.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s Rondo harvests a decade’s worth of new writing by one of Australia’s foremost poets. It is currently shortlisted for the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier's Literature Awards. This new collection paints a vivid portrait of eucalypt Australia’s current position in an rapidly changing world. The poet asks for fresh meanings from Gallipoli and Scotland, from physics and from ‘Art’s porous auditorium’, where poetry can still be heard. ‘The words are only the words,’ he writes, ‘which is more or less everything.’

Sheri Benning grew up on a small farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. She’s since travelled widely while attaining several academic degrees. She published two books of poetry in Canada, Thin Moon Psalm (Brick Books, 2007) and Earth After Rain (Thistledown Press, 2001). Her poetry, essays and fiction have also appeared in Canadian literary journals and anthologies. Sheri Benning’s most recent collection of poems, The Season’s Vagrant Light: New and Selected Poems, was published by Carcanet Press. She completed a PhD at the University of Glasgow and currently teaches at the University of Saskatchewan.

The Season’s Vagrant Light marks the UK début of Canadian poet Sheri Benning, featuring new poems alongside work previously published in Canada. Benning’s early work draws on her strongly felt connection to her native landscape, rural Saskatchewan. In poems that couple sinew and roots, blood and sap, skin and stone, Benning explores an ecology of affiliation between humans and the natural world. The poems are also alive to the quiet intimacies between father and daughter, mother and child, between siblings and between lovers. Benning’s later work travels further afield – to Russia, New Mexico, Scotland – but always the physical landscape is entwined with memory, the landscapes of the mind.

This event is free to attend, but please reserve a place via Eventbrite. There is also a Facebook page. The event will begin at 19:00 and include readings from both poets, as well as a discussion where there will be the opportunity to ask questions. The café's bar will be open and refreshments available for purchase. Please direct any queries to jazmine@carcanet.co.uk.

Entry: Free

Time: 7:00pm