Ennis Book Club Festival

I will be talking about how to read poetry - not your own but other people's - at the Ennis Book Club Festival next Saturday morning.

I find new poets, for the most part, in poetry anthologies. One poem I stumble across will lead me to seek out more poems by the same poet. I'll be focussing on four anthologies in particular:

Staying Alive edited by Neil Astley, published by Bloodaxe, 

The Penguin Book of English Verse edited by Paul Keegan, 

99 Poems In Translation edited by Harold Pinter, Anthony Astbury & Geoffrey Godbert, published by Grove Press

& Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets edited by Roddy Lumsden, published by Bloodaxe.

I will also talk a bit about the way the poems I read sometimes influence, very directly, the poems I write and will give a couple of  examples. Last November I rewrote a section of the Song of Songs, the sexy bit of the Bible, after reading it in a poetry anthology. I will read the result next Saturday morning.

Tickets for the event can be booked here.

After lunch, I will be reading from my new poetry collection The Ghost in the Lobby, alongside American poet Christopher Locke, whose work I have long admired.