Autumn 2007

Fri Oct 12 Charles Bennett
Perhaps best known as the driving force behind the Ledbury Poetry Festival, which he ran single-handedly for six years, Charles Bennett now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire. He has published a number of award-winning short collections and his highly-acclaimed first full collection, Wintergreen, was published by Headland in 2002. His second, How to Make a Woman Out of Water, with a cover by David Hockney, appeared from Enitharmon in May 2007.

The Room

A sofa and two matching chairs
in the elbow of a country lane
have been abandoned so we
may rest for a while pretending
this is our living room.

Review by Caroline Cook in The Stanza 35
 

Fri Nov 16 Anne-Marie Fyfe
Anne-Marie Fyfe, an Irish-born poet, now living in West London, is the new Poetry Society Chair. She took over from Ruth Padel in November 2006. Her poem Curacao Dusk won the Cardiff International Poetry Competition (2004), and in 2003 she was the Aldeburgh Poetry Trust's Writer-in-Residence. She has three poetry collections, the latest being The Ghost Twin, of which Helen Dunmore wrote that it is "taut, elegant, eloquent and deeply felt."  Tom Paulin has described her poems as having "a lyric clarity, an ontological accuracy and unflinching vigilance that is both spiritual and revelatory."

Fri Dec 14 Members’ reading (Mike Brewer, Maxine Linnell,  Brian Fewster)