Poetry Reviews

My short reviews of Nancy Gaffield's Tokaido Road, Ahren Warner's Confer, and Carol Watts' Occasionals appear in today's Guardian. All were well worth the read.

Tonight on The Verb

Tonight's edition of The Verb with Ian McMillan (BBC Radio 3, 9:15 p.m.) includes Infinite Difference contributors Harriet Tarlo and Carol Watts, as well as poet Ira Lightman. Listen in!

A truly pluralist UK event

When one of last year's Eliot Prize judges commented on the breadth of the shortlist, when another poet commented on the impressive range of the Ted Hughes Award shortlist, I laughed, as the breadth of each seemed about the width of my thumbnail.

Now comes an outstanding "colloquy of poets" at the University of Hull this November, where Philip Gross and Tony Lopez have each invited four favourite poets to read with them in a wonderful array of readers and poetries: John Burnside, Kelvin Corcoran, Peter Manson, Daljit Nagra, Denise Riley, Zoe Skoulding, Carol Watts, and Susan Wicks. Unfortunately, the event is the same weekend as the National Association for Writers in Education annual conference, so I'll miss it, but if you'd like to attend (and report back?), you can find further details here--just scroll down to 13-14 November.

Women's Innovative Poetry & Cross-Genre Festival, 14-16 July, London

Emily Critchley and Carol Watts have drawn together an outstanding array of presenters and performers for the Women's Innovative Poetry & Cross-Genre Festival this Wednesday, 14 July through Friday, 16 July at the University of Greenwich. Participants include Caroline Bergvall, Andrea Brady, Lee Ann Brown, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susanna Gardener, Lisa Jarnot, Frances Presley, Lisa Robertson, Sophie Robinson, Eleni Sikelianos, Zoe Skoulding, Harriet Tarlo, Fiona Templeton, Cathy Wagner, and numerous others--the full schedule is online here. And the cost? Donation only. I'm expecting moments of poetic bliss.

Poetry Days in London: Wednesday, 13 May

(That's right, there were three days in a row of this delight.) I spent the afternoon at one of my favourite places, The British Library, doing some research for my introduction to the anthology I'm editing for Shearsman, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets. I'm very pleased with the anthology's range, with such poets as Caroline Bergvall, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Carol Watts, Claire Crowther, Zoe Skoulding, Sophie Mayer--the list goes on! To my surprise and pleasure, a while into my research I started writing the intro--it poured onto the paper, and I could see the structure for the essay as a whole. After worrying about how to present and structure it for some months now, I was relieved to have the matter solved. 

That evening Claire and I attended the launch of C.K. Stead's Collected Poems (Carcanet) at New Zealand House. There I met the man himself (who knew my poems from TLS!), Eric Ormsby, Anthony Thwaite, and Siobhan Campbell, and saw some familiar faces, in particular Jane Yeh and Todd Swift. In other words, great conversation bubbled on and on. 

Afterward, Jane, Siobhan, Claire and I decided to go to dinner nearby, and Jane took us to a wonderful Korean restaurant (I'll ask her the name and revise this with it when I have it). We tried a number of unexpected, delicious, and interesting dishes and talked the night away (the launch had begun at 6, so it was only eight or so when we went to dinner). Indeed, when we left and went to catch the tube, Claire and I saw it was eleven-thirty (!) and we'd have to catch a night bus back to Claire's. We didn't stop talking the entire trip; we were both buzzing over the ideal night.