Poetry

We open the Saturday afternoon of our bumper poetry weekend with the first of our traditional double bills, though there’s nothing traditional at all about either Tara Bergin or Sean O’Brien. Two very different poets who are concerned with the way our lives are deeply affected by politics, gender and history. ...

Our second double bill of the afternoon brings together two poets who grew up in one distinctive place and have settled in another: poet and broadcaster, Paul Farley, moving from Knowsley to Lancaster, while Northern Irish poet Colette Bryce, born ‘between the Creggan and the Bogside/to the sounds of crowds and smashing glass’, now lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. Each has long since discovered and explored the wider world beyond that early place. ...

Our final double bill presents two poets new to the northwest. Raymond Antrobus is a founding member of ‘Chill Pill’ and he is also one of the world's first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word education from Goldsmiths University. Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish poet and essayist whose first prose work, Ghost in the Throat (2020), is both an autofiction and a celebration of the eighteenth-century Irish Gaelic poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonail’s brilliant, angry elegy for her husband, “The Lament for Art O’Leary”. ...

Poetry lives in the veins of Britain, its farms and moors, its motorways and waterways, highlands and beaches, so for the final event in our poetry day we are proud to celebrate the poetry of place. ...