Reading on Place (1): 'North, South, East, West' (E1), Friday 13th November 2020, 12-1pm
This episode is hosted by Susannah Hart
We began the first of our three-day festival by bringing together poets from the four corners of the UK, from Aberdeenshire to Cornwall and from Merseyside to Norfolk. Martin Malone’s new selected Larksong Static takes a synoptic view of the last 15 years of writing. He is described by Carol Ann Duffy as offering ‘an excavation of time and place, landscape and language, every word alert to the elements without and their emotions within. Sue Burge’s The Saltwater Diaries is ‘a beautiful evocation of all that is special about the coast, perfectly capturing the taste of salt on the wind and the life that is often undiscovered beneath rocks, along beaches and dancing in the air’ (Mark Davidson). Wild Persistence is Katrina Naomi’s first collection since relocating from London to Penzance, described by Liz Berry as ‘a collection to win readers and then pull the ground from beneath them’. Maria Isakova Bennett’s recent work ‘begins with the contemplation and perception of place and the depiction of place in art’. …an ache in each welcoming kiss is a sequence of 22 poems communicating to and with paintings in Merseyside art galleries and extending the boundaries of ekphrasis. All in all, a veritable poetic tour from coast to coast to coast to coast!
