Place (2) : Between Places: Britain and Europe (E6), Saturday 14th November 2020, 12-1 PM
With Sharon Black, Alex Josephy, Fokkina McDonnell and Christopher North
This event, hosted by Paul Stephenson, brings together four poets that split their time between the UK and France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. The readings consider the impact of Brexit on their lives and, indeed, on their writing. Sharon Black lives in a remote valley of the Cévennes mountains of southern France. Editor of Pindrop Press, she ‘doesn’t just write about the world - a rock, a flock of starlings, an affair - but into it, inhabiting each subject with sensual passion and immense lyrical grace: a true indwelling’ (Adam Thorpe’). Christopher North moved to Spain to facilitate writing retreats and courses at Almassera Vella near Alicante. His latest pamphlet The Topiary of Passchendaele was a winner in the Poetry Business competition 2018. Alex Josephy lives half the year in Italy, and this is explored in her descriptions of the natural world, in the musical Italian vocabulary and portraits of village life in her collection Naked Since Faversham. Fokkina McDonnell is an Anglo-Dutch poet who has spent the last 35 years in Manchester and whose poems are ‘confidently written, with economy and precision, moving, witty’ (Carole Bromley).
