Festival Launch (E1), Thursday 4th November 2021, 7 - 8pm
With Sarah Doyle, Vanessa Lampert, Samatar Elmi and Stephen Payne. Hosted by Paul Stephenson and Patricia Debney
Revisiting our festival themes of Place, Perception and Play, the launch event kicks off 3 full days of poetry with four poets from four incredible independent presses. Three poets launch their debut pamphlets. For ‘Place’, the Pre-Raphaelite Society’s Poet-in-Residence Sarah Doyle reads from her pamphlet of collage poems – Something so wild and new in this feeling (V. Press) – inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals from The Lake District. For ‘Perception’, ‘in her debut pamphlet, On Long Loan (Live Canon), Vanessa Lampert brings ‘the lightest touch to the weightiest matters, sees sharply near and poignantly far, and, to coin a contradiction, illuminates with shadow’ (Glyn Maxwell). For ‘Play’, Samatar Elmi’s debut pamphlet was the Poetry Book Society’s summer choice in 2021. Portrait of Colossus (HappenStance) navigates parenting, masculinity, racism and ambiguities of identity, and does so with skill and sly humour. Stephen Payne’s second full collection, Windmill Proof (HappenStance) contains playful, perceptive and place poems, where poems are games and provocations, and where ‘even a geometrical shape can slip seamlessly into matters of the heart’. We also introduce our visual artist in residence, Arjuna Gunarathne, who successfully marries the Eastern and Western traditions to present unique works focussing on political, social and personal experience.
