Poetry Reading: Final 2022 Coast to Coast to Coast Event
SAT 26 NOV / 5.30-7.30PM / OPEN EYE GALLERY
FREE, BOOK HERE
Come along to the entertaining, thought-provoking, and inspiring evening: final 2022 Coast to Coast to Coast poetry reading event hosted by Maria Isakova-Bennett! At this event we will launch a limited edition hand-stitched journal Scar Tissue by Stephen Keeler, enjoy readings from Coast to Coast to Coast poets Judy Brown and Ken Evans, and hear innovative music from Nick Branton.
Stephen Keeler won a 2020 Individual Poet Prize for his manuscript Scar Tissue. Scar Tissue is a poetry memoir in which objects (for instance, sea-coal, broken bottles, a book, the morning papers) all carry significance and are peppered, as life, with loss but also the compensations of continued living.
Prize winning Seren poet Judy Brown will read from her recent collection published this autumn, Lairs. This is Judy’s third book and is full of claustrophobic spaces, and moments of new and altered vision. Bringing something primal and secret – the lair as haven for a wild or feral animal, with the poem framed as a mathematical equation. Here, the lair is both the community at large and a dark and intricate interior space where something wild still survives. Kathryn Simmonds says of the book: Each poem offers up its own shock of uneasy wonder. This is a thrilling and compulsive collection.
Ken Evans will be reading from his recent collection published this month by Salt, To An Occupier Burning Holes. It’s been said that Ken’s poems are as entertaining as they are impressive, these poems are in and of the physical world, brimming with ideas and passion and sharing it all with real panache.‘…a poignant and genuinely romantic collection … painfully well observed and beautifully alive.’ – Luke Kennard.
Stephen Keeler is a poet and memoirist who, from the north-east of England, moved to Sweden as a teacher, in 1973. He has worked in China, Vietnam, former Yugoslavia and in most of the eastern European countries. Widowed in 2003, Stephen eventually moved to the north-west Scottish highlands to write full-time. In 2012, he was awarded the first Highland Literary Salon Poetry Prize by John Glenday, and in 2015 he received a New Writing Award from the Scottish Book Trust. In addition to his Coast to Coast to Coast Journal, Stephen has two further pamphlets published in 2018 and 2021, and a memoir ‘in fragments of a foreign language’, 50 Words for Love in Swedish. Stephen recently devised, edited and introduced Ten Poems About Running for Candlestick Press (2022). A third pamphlet, Breakfast Poems, and a second memoir, Superlative Objects, are forthcoming.
Judy Brown has been poet-in-residence at Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s home in Grasmere, and at Gladstone’s Library in Wales. She has written poems in collaboration with mathematicians at Exeter University and mentors poets for the Poetry Society. Judy has taught business writing for the Royal Literary Fund and was once a lawyer. Her earlier books were Crowd Sensations (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a shortlistee for the Ledbury Forte Prize) and Loudness, her first, which was shortlisted for the Forward and Aldeburgh prizes for best first collection.
Ken Evans won the Leeds Peace Prize in 2019; the Kent & Sussex Poetry Competition (2018); and Battered Moons (2016). He has twice been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition (2015 and 2020). His poems appear in Poetry Scotland, Magma, Under the Radar, Envoi, 14 magazine, The High Window, and IS&T. Ken’s first pamphlet, The Opposite of Defeat, and first collection, True Forensics were published by Eyewear. To An Occupier Burning Holes is Ken’s second collection.
Organised by artist and poet Maria Isakova-Bennett. Photographs by Ron Davies.
Image: Maria Isakova-Bennett.
SAT 26 NOV / 5.30-7.30PM / OPEN EYE GALLERY
FREE, BOOK HERE
Come along to the entertaining, thought-provoking, and inspiring evening: final 2022 Coast to Coast to Coast poetry reading event hosted by Maria Isakova-Bennett! At this event we will launch a limited edition hand-stitched journal Scar Tissue by Stephen Keeler, enjoy readings from Coast to Coast to Coast poets Judy Brown and Ken Evans, and hear innovative music from Nick Branton.
Stephen Keeler won a 2020 Individual Poet Prize for his manuscript Scar Tissue. Scar Tissue is a poetry memoir in which objects (for instance, sea-coal, broken bottles, a book, the morning papers) all carry significance and are peppered, as life, with loss but also the compensations of continued living.
Prize winning Seren poet Judy Brown will read from her recent collection published this autumn, Lairs. This is Judy’s third book and is full of claustrophobic spaces, and moments of new and altered vision. Bringing something primal and secret – the lair as haven for a wild or feral animal, with the poem framed as a mathematical equation. Here, the lair is both the community at large and a dark and intricate interior space where something wild still survives. Kathryn Simmonds says of the book: Each poem offers up its own shock of uneasy wonder. This is a thrilling and compulsive collection.
Ken Evans will be reading from his recent collection published this month by Salt, To An Occupier Burning Holes. It’s been said that Ken’s poems are as entertaining as they are impressive, these poems are in and of the physical world, brimming with ideas and passion and sharing it all with real panache.‘…a poignant and genuinely romantic collection … painfully well observed and beautifully alive.’ – Luke Kennard.
Stephen Keeler is a poet and memoirist who, from the north-east of England, moved to Sweden as a teacher, in 1973. He has worked in China, Vietnam, former Yugoslavia and in most of the eastern European countries. Widowed in 2003, Stephen eventually moved to the north-west Scottish highlands to write full-time. In 2012, he was awarded the first Highland Literary Salon Poetry Prize by John Glenday, and in 2015 he received a New Writing Award from the Scottish Book Trust. In addition to his Coast to Coast to Coast Journal, Stephen has two further pamphlets published in 2018 and 2021, and a memoir ‘in fragments of a foreign language’, 50 Words for Love in Swedish. Stephen recently devised, edited and introduced Ten Poems About Running for Candlestick Press (2022). A third pamphlet, Breakfast Poems, and a second memoir, Superlative Objects, are forthcoming.
Judy Brown has been poet-in-residence at Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s home in Grasmere, and at Gladstone’s Library in Wales. She has written poems in collaboration with mathematicians at Exeter University and mentors poets for the Poetry Society. Judy has taught business writing for the Royal Literary Fund and was once a lawyer. Her earlier books were Crowd Sensations (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a shortlistee for the Ledbury Forte Prize) and Loudness, her first, which was shortlisted for the Forward and Aldeburgh prizes for best first collection.
Ken Evans won the Leeds Peace Prize in 2019; the Kent & Sussex Poetry Competition (2018); and Battered Moons (2016). He has twice been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition (2015 and 2020). His poems appear in Poetry Scotland, Magma, Under the Radar, Envoi, 14 magazine, The High Window, and IS&T. Ken’s first pamphlet, The Opposite of Defeat, and first collection, True Forensics were published by Eyewear. To An Occupier Burning Holes is Ken’s second collection.
Organised by artist and poet Maria Isakova-Bennett. Photographs by Ron Davies.
Image: Maria Isakova-Bennett.
