Love, landscape and Rich Teas

Published on 23 April 2012 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

We’re kicking off May at the Poetry Room with the wonderful Little Gods by Jacob Polley (Picador, 2006). The book is Cumbrian-born Polley’s second collection: a writer who, although young in poet-years, is also an award-winning novelist, film-maker and has been discussed in the media as a future poet laureate.
Little Gods meditates on love, loss, the natural world and the passage of time in poems that are subtle, technically adept and surprising. Polley borrows from the gothic while also evoking a grounded contemporary world of bananas, plastic dog shit and cheese spread. The poems we will be looking at in particular are:

The Owls
You
Greenwich
Telephone
Mirror
Morning
Sally Somewhere
Decree
City in Winter

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday 1 May at 6pm-8pm on 3rd Floor of the City Library, Newcastle. (Turn right out of the lift and head towards the circle of chairs next to the back wall! ) If you have never been before, make this the month and get May off to a poetic start!

Boilers, Birds and Banking

Published on 26 March 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed

The piercing, beautiful and witty Profit and Loss by Leontia Flynn (Cape, 2011) is our poetry book of choice for this month.  Although still in her thirties (and as the poet says in Letter To Friends ‘these days we’re classed as youth/till 44) this is Flynn’s third collection:  her first book won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and her second the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

Divided into three sequences, Profit and Loss opens with meditations on past rooms and lives, before moving into a long poem that explores the sociological and technological changes of the last decade through the filter of a flat-clearing.  The collection ends with poems of filial grief coupled with the consolations of motherhood. 

We will be looking at the following poems in particular.

‘The Notorious Case of Robert the Painter’

The Day We Discovered Pornography in the Mail

The Help-Line

The Superser

Colette

There’s Birds in My Story

Letter To Friends (Part I)

A Plane

Bubbles

 See you in Newcastle City Library next Tuesday (3 April) at 6pm-8pm.  We’ll be in the usual place which is level three, turn right out of the lifts and head for the circle of seats next to the back wall!  Do come.  And if you’ve never been before, Spring is a good time to try something new.

A New Star

Published on 17 February 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed

In 2011, Rachael Boast’s Sidereal won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and, surprisingly for a book of poetry, was long-listed for The Guardian First Book Award. Its title is a Latinate word, meaning ‘of…’ or ‘like stars’ and these poems are full of allusions to the sky at night, lending them a striking luminosity: impossible not to feel wonder when witnessing a meteor shower or contemplating the vastness of space but a harder thing altogether to communicate it convincingly. Boast’s poems are highly reflective, nuanced meditations on relationship, the ‘space’ between things, the constellation of a life. There is much movement, an almost reluctant restlessness, charting the attentive navigation necessary for intimacy within a landscape, feet on the ground, as well as in the territory of the heart. Earth and spirit vie for an authentic balance in intelligent, playful poems that range round the co-ordinates of what can be sustained, where it is possible to place one’s faith, in the face of suffering and impermanence.

Divided into two mirror-like sections, the poems in this collection we’ll be considering include:

I
Human Telescope
The Hum
A View of Canaletto’s Venice
Cycle Path
View of the Gorge
Highlands

II
Rainbow Weather
The Long View
Syzygy
Void of Course
Sandpipers
Ephemeris

Follow the stars to the City Library on Tuesday 6 March, 6pm-8pm to find out more about this impressive and enjoyable new voice in the contemporary poetry firmament.

Making Love and Poetry

Published on 24 January 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed

Love, ain’t it grand! Or not as the case may be.  Whether you’re starry-eyed and spooning or fed up to the back teeth with all things February, The Picador Book of Love Poems (Picador 2011) has something for you.  From the first flush to the last gasp, there’s a poem about it in this anthology. Editor John Stammers couples a contemporary poet with an older counterpart throughout to allow the generations to talk across the centuries about love and loss.

Poems we will be looking at in particular are:

True Love by  Sharon Olds

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy

Arab Love-Song by Francis Thompson

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps by Galway Kinnell

Prayer by Hugo Williams

A Private Bottling by Don Paterson

Nevers by Colette Bryce

The Farmer’s Bride by Charlotte Mew

The Voice by Thomas Hardy

(Time allowing!)  See you from 6pm-8pm on Tuesday 7 February on the third floor of Newcastle’s City Library:  walk straight in front of you as you leave the lifts and keep going until you reach the back wall!  Looking forward to seeing you there, especially if you have never been before.

Black Cat Bone

Published on 4 January 2012 in Uncategorized. Closed

Happy New Year to you all!  We have a particularly fine selection of poetry books to read this year in the Poetry Room and we’ll be starting with John Burnside’s 12th collection, Black Cat Bone, winner of the 2011 Forward Prize.  A book fascinated with winter, it ranges across inner and outer landscapes, considering the unsettling tension between hope and disappointment.  His references are wide and scholarly (The Bible, Kafka, Melville, Breughel et al) but he’s also not above Lucille Ball and the voodoo bone of the title, ‘conferring success, invisibility and sexual power on its owner’.  Burnside’s poems are haunting and persuasive, sinuous in their syntax, crystalline in their imagery ‘more sleight-of-hand/ than sorrow’.  Amongst others we’ll be looking at:

The Fair Chase
Disappointment
Loved and Lost
Notes Towards an Ending
Hurts Me Too
Oh No, Not My Baby
Down By the River
Bird Nest Bound
Hearsay
Amnesia
Pieter Breughel: Winter Landscape…
Late Show
From the Chinese

Looking forward to seeing you at Newcastle City Library to blow the Christmas cobwebs away on Tuesday 10th January, 6pm-8pm.

Snakes, Mothers and Desperate Men

Published on 2 December 2011 in Uncategorized. Closed

We’re rounding off this year at the Poetry Room with the wonderful Martina Evans, whose poetry collection Facing the Public (Anvil, 2009) received the Ciampi International Poetry Prize and was named by Bernard O’Donoghue as his book of the year.

We will be focusing on the following poems:

Two Hostages
Omar Khadr
Royalty
Desperate Men
Facing The Public
The Australian Rug
Boa Constrictor
The King is Dead
Bloody Mary
Knock

For more information on Martina see www.martinaevans.com.

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday 13 December from 6pm-8pm at the usual place, Level 3 of Newcastle City Library.

And if you’re wondering why we’re a week later this month, it’s to allow you to attend the unmissable Bloodaxe Lectures given this year by Sean O’Brien: for more information see www.ncl.ac.uk/ncla/events/item/bloodaxe-poetry-lectures-by-sean-o-brien.

You’re especially welcome at the Poetry Room if you’ve never been before: make December the month!

101 Sonnets

Published on 19 October 2011 in Uncategorized. Closed

A reminder that we’re meeting on the second Tuesday of the month in November (to fit in a trip to Northern Stage to see What are They Whispering?, a show about poetry, with readings by Imitiaz Dharker, Joe Dunthorne and John Stammers).

So, on 8 November, 6pm-8pm at City Library, we’ll be looking at Don Paterson’s 101 Sonnets: from Shakespeare to Heaney. Don is also appearing at Durham Book Festival where he is this year’s Festival Laureate, and one of the events he’ll be appearing at is dedicated to his interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

This anthology is both a survey and a celebration of the much-loved 14-line form. Do read the excellent introduction – all you wanted to know about sonnets but were afraid to ask… We won’t have time to look at all 101 but those we’ll be considering will include:

Robert Frost The Silken Tent
Jo Shapcott Muse
Wallace Stevens The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain
Robert Crawford Opera
Michael Donaghy The Brother
RS Thomas The Bright Field
DG Rossetti A Sonnet
Patrick Kavanagh Inniskeen Road
Michael Drayton Since There’s No Help…?
Ciaran Carson Finding the Ox
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Swineherd?
John Keats When I Have Fears…?
WH Auden Who’s Who
William Shakespeare That Time of Year…
George Herbert Prayer
Seamus Heaney The Skylight

Poetry with Body

Published on 27 September 2011 in Uncategorized. Closed

Michael Symmons Roberts’ fourth collection Corpus embraces the body in all its mess and gloriousness. The book, which won the Whitbread Prize, includes poems that explore both the living body and the corpse in religion, art, science and myth.
We will be focusing on some of the following poems:

Ascension Day
Corpse
The Hands
Carnivorous I
Carnivorous II
Jairus
Choreography
The Razor
To John Donne
Last Things

So come with your hearts, heads, hands and other body-parts to Level 4 of the City Library, Newcastle between 6pm-8pm this Tuesday 4 October. All are very welcome: looking forward to seeing you in particular!

Read Regional (and a little further afield)

Published on 24 August 2011 in Uncategorized. Closed

This month at the Poetry Room, we’ll be looking at poems from writers involved in this year’s Read Regional campaign (some very close to home) and more far-flung voices who have provided inspiration for local poets.

Photocopies of the poems will be available on the night but, for a taster, do look at the following:

I Go Back To May 1937 by Sharon Olds

www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/olds/poems.html

The Linen Industry by Michael Longley

In a White Town by Daljit Nagra

(both of the above poems should come up on a google search)

For information on the Read Regional Campaign see www.readregional.com

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday 6 September between 6pm-8pm on the third floor of Newcastle’s, City Library. All are very welcome whether you’re a first-timer or an old-hand. See you there!

Around the World in Seven Poems

Published on 6 July 2011 in Uncategorized. Closed

We had a wonderful readaround at last night’s Poetry Room. The selection of current favourites that people brought were fascinating and very varied but we were able to trace connections between them all. Form was a particular concern, as was place. Three American poets, two Indian, one from Scotland and another from the north of England – a great way to sign off before our summer break. Looking forward to seeing you all again in September.

The poems we looked at were:

The Present – Michael Donaghy
The Peace of Wild Things – Wendell Berry
Glose – Marilyn Hacker
Ghazal – Darshan Singh
The Worker – Rabindrath Tagore
Late Night Walk Down Terry Street – Douglas Dunn
Grace Darling Learns to Count – Christy Ducker