Monthly Archives: April 2015

Cheltenham calling…

The Cheltenham Poetry Festival started in earnest yesterday. In a spectacular piece of bad timing, I spent the day on a flight to the US for my day-job and will be out of the country for most of the festival before heading to Cheltenham on Sunday 3rd May for our latest Rewiring History live event followed by a joint reading with Claire Trévien. Which means I’m going to miss out on some fantastic poetry in the intervening 10 days. Continue reading

Close Reading: An Education in Silence

The longer I spend in poetry’s experimental borderlands in pursuit of linguistic monsters and verbal wizardry, the greater the importance of making regular visits back to the lyric mainstream to remember that skilled, nuanced, exciting poems aren’t the sole preserve of any single tradition. Here’s a wonderful dramatic monologue from Jessica Traynor’s collection Liffey Swim, reproduced here by kind permission of the author. Continue reading