Rack Poets at the London Irish Centre

Left to right
Michael McKimm, Róisín Tierney, Tony Murray,
Deirdre Shanahan, Jim Conwell, and Martina Evans

There was an excellent turnout on Thursday night (24 April) at the London Irish Centre in Camden Square in north London where Rack Poets Martina Evans, Róisín Tierney and Deirdre Shanahan read with poets Jim Conwell and Michael McKimm (pictured with host for the evening Dr Tony Murray, Director of Irish Studies at London Metropolitan University).
All the poets sold well and a most enjoyable night was had by all.



The London Irish Centre runs an extensive programme of vibrant arts events and we were particularly pleased to be included amongst their events for this season.

Róisín Tierney, Sue Murray of Rack Press, Deirdre Shanahan,
and Martina Evans at the London Irish Centre

Rack Poets at the London Irish Centre And in Yorkshire 24 April

Three Rack poets are reading at the London Irish Centre on 24th April with Michael McKimm and Jim Conwell.

Deirdre Shanahan will be reading from her new Rack Press pamphlet, Recovery Position, Róisín Tierney will be reading from her new Arc book The Spanish-Italian Border and Martina Evans will be reading from her forthcoming book from Anvil Burnfort Las Vegas. It will be quite a night.

And if you happen to be in Yorkshire on the same night, Rack poet Ian Parks is reading with others at The Bookcase in Hebden Bridge:

An evening of poetry and music

with poets 

Ian Parks and Atar Hadari

music by Stephen Shulman and guests

Sarah Blood & Nigel Waterhouse

*

Thursday 24^th April

7 – 9 pm

The Book Case

29 Market Street, Hebden Bridge

Atar Hadari’s Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems on H.N. Bialik (Syracuse University Press) was a finalist for the American Literary Translator’s Association Award. His debut poetry collection is Rembrandt’s Bible (Indigo Dreams, 2013) and his Lives of the Dead: Poems of Hanoch Levin, is forthcoming from Arc Publications.

Ian Parks is the only poet to have been published in the Times Literary Supplement and The Morning Star on the same day. He is described by Points North Magazine as 'an heroic figure in Yorkshire poetry and a living legend in Hull'. His collections include Shell Island, The Landing Stage, Love Poems 1979-2009, and The Exile's House. The Cavafy Variations was a Poetry Book Society Choice.

Steven Shulman is a violinist and composer, a member of The Orchestra of Opera North and founder member of The Frailach Spielers Klezmer Band. Nigel Waterhouse has worked as an accordion soloist with the BBC Symphony and with Opera North, and with the soprano Sarah Blood (Opera North Chorus), will be performing Stephen’s setting of Sylvia Plath’s ’Wuthering Heights’.

hosted by Sarah Corbett

Tickets £5 in advance or on the door. Email: shop@bookcase.co.uk to reserve

Samantha Wynne Rhydderch Reads 30 April

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch will be reading from her new Rack pamphlet Lime & Winter at the National Wool Museum of Wales on 30th April at 7pm.  

This excellent collection is the product of a residency at the Museum and it will be a fine evening of poetry and music in Wales.  

Admission free.

Two New Titles, from Christopher Reid and Nicholas Murray

Two new titles from Rack Press are published this month and available now from this site or bookshops such as the London Review Bookshop and Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham.  They are launched at The Lamb in Bloomsbury on 16th April.  Come and join us!

Yesterday’s News by Christopher Reid is the result of an unusual and stimulating commission. Alain de Botton, who in the autumn of 2012 was at work on his book The News: A User’s Manual, asked Christopher Reid to supply him with poems – any number – in response to news items that had fired the poet’s imagination. 

Reid continued until he had written what felt like ‘enough’: eleven poems addressing, among other topics common to daily journalism, war, politics, natural disaster, murder, scandal and death. 

Different events elicited different approaches and treatments, and the small collection that accumulated between late October and the middle of December shows how the proverbial ephemerality of ‘yesterday’s news’ can be challenged and transformed by the disciplines of poetic art.

Trench Feet, by Nicholas Murray offers itself as comic relief for those surfeited with World War 1 media coverage.  In this topical satire the centenary of the Great War has arrived and bright, ambitious academic, Jeremy Button, is determined to turn it to his advantage with a TV series on the poets of the war.  But things do not go according to plan…

Following the success of Get Real!  his 2011 satire on the Coalition Government, Nicholas Murray’s new poem lampoons the clichés currently being trundled into position to ‘celebrate’ the centenary of the outbreak of War in 1914.  

‘It is the wit that does the real damage in this bravura display of finely controlled outrage.’   

Times Literary Supplement on Get Real!

O, greatcoats and duckboards, ponies and rats,

poppies and skeletons, mud and tin hats!