Reading on Place (3): 'Place and Memory' (E11), Sunday 15th November 2020, 12-1pm
Our host for this event is Patricia Debney
How much of a place do we carry with us into the future? And how does the memory of place ripple down across generations? In her mid-20s, Heidi Williamson was part of a Scottish community that suffered an inconceivable tragedy – the Dunblane Primary School shooting. Those years living in the town form the focus of Return by Minor Road. Through rivers, rain, wildlife and landscape, she revisits where ‘the occasional endures’. Psychotherapist Alan Buckley’s Touched is a debut collection that understands the value of subtlety and restraint, exploring personal trauma and the “fragile, desperate weight” of our lives through poems that speak elegantly of hard-won insight’ (Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian). “The sea, the sea, always recommencing” wrote the great French poet Paul Valéry. Jennifer Edgecombe’s debut pamphlet The Grief of The Sea is an exploration of loss and its relationship with the ocean, the two eternally bound together. These poems showcase her exceptional ability to evoke taste, touch, sound, and most of all, depth of feeling. Lucia Dove has been working on a project that explores the relationship between Essex and the Netherlands through their geographical landscape and shared cultural memory of the North Sea flood of 1953 which devastated both places on the same night. Her debut pamphlet Say cucumber leads you into a world that slips between the familiar and unfamiliar.
