Nevada Street Poets – Five Voices

On Tuesday evening, September 5th, a live and a virtual audience were treated to some moving, amusing, profound and stimulating poetry by five members of the Nevada Street Poets group.

Apart from a few issues with the audio experienced by some members of the Zoom audience (a mystery for me why it happened this time, and to some and not others…), the evening was a thorough success. Jocelyn Page, Graham High, Sarah Westcott, Richard Meier and Lorraine Mariner read from their published collections and some poems that haven’t yet been published, touching on themes such as sport, parenting, ageing, death, children, nature and the environment – and as with all poetry, the themes didn’t mean that you could pigeonhole each poem into a particular category.

We also heard two poignant tributes marking two significant losses. Lorraine Mariner ended the first set by reading ‘The Otter’ by Seamus Heaney and Jocelyn Page ended the second set reading the poem ‘A Story about Water’ by the young award winning poet Gboyega Odubanjo, who lost his life tragically just over a week ago.

A big thank you to poet Wendy French who managed the Zoom side of things with grace and patience despite the sound problems. And as always a big thank you to Debra and staff at the wonderful West Greenwich Library for being so helpful, flexible and generous.

The event was recorded and it’s available for private perusal. Please email me irena@in-words.co.uk for the link.

And here is how you can buy their books:

Sarah Westcott: https://sarahwestcott.co.uk/contact

Lorraine Mariner: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/lorraine-mariner/5624 and https://www.candlestickpress.co.uk/biography/mariner-lorraine/

Richard Meier: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/richard-meier/misadventure/9781447208464 and https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/richard-meier/search-party/9781509851980

Graham High: www.grahamhighartist.com

Jocelyn Page: http://www.jocelyn-page.com

And here are short bios of the poets in alphabetical order…

Graham High is a widely published poet with eight chapbooks and collections to date. He is also involved with other forms of writing, including haiku and haibun and was President of the British Haiku Society for four years. Graham is also a painter and sculptor with exhibitions and commissions both in the UK and abroad, an Animatronic Model Designer in the Film Industry working on the effects of over 40 feature films since 1981 including ‘Aliens’, ‘The Golden Compass’, Labyrinth, Babe, The English Patient and the ‘Harry Potter’ series. He now shares his time between London and Norfolk where his sculpture studio is.

Lorraine Mariner lives in London and works at the National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre. She has published two collections with Picador, Furniture (2009) and There Will Be No More Nonsense (2014) and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize twice, for Best Single Poem and Best First Collection, and for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize. Her most recent publication is the poetry chapbook, Anchorage with Grey Suit Editions (2020).

Richard Meier won the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize in 2010. He has published two collections with Picador: Search Party (2019) and Misadventure (2012), which was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Prize.

Jocelyn Page, a poet from Connecticut living in London, has published in various journals including The Spectator, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Salzburg, South Carolina Review and Poetry Review. Her debut pamphlet, smithereens, was published in 2010 by tall lighthouse press and her 2016 You’ve Got to Wait Till the Man You Trust Says Go was the winner of the Goldsmiths’ Writer Centre’s inaugural Poetry Pamphlet award. She has held residencies at The Reach Climbing Centre in Woolwich and the 999 Club homeless centre. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College and the University of London Worldwide. http://www.jocelyn-page.com

Sarah Westcott’s first collection Slant Light (Pavilion Poetry), was highly commended in the Forward Prize. Her second collection, Bloom, also with Pavilion Poetry, was longlisted in the 2022 Laurel Prize for ecopoetry. Sarah was a journalist for twenty years and now works as a freelance writer, editor and tutor. Work has appeared on beermats, billboards and buses, baked into sourdough bread and installed in a nature reserve, triggered by footsteps. She is shortly starting a PhD in zoopoetics at the University of Birmingham.

Events

Tuesday May 14, 7pm on Zoom:

Voices from the Blog – in collaboration with Mary Evans Picture Library.

Readings by Natan Barreto, David Bottomley, Wendy French, Sue Hubbard, Maggie MacKay, Marion McCready, Hugh McMillan and Jill Sharp.

Remembering Gill Stoker.

A great line-up for this small tribute to Gill, who founded and curated the Poems and Pictures Blog for the Picture Library, attracting and encouraging poets to ‘match’ poems with pictures from the Library’s huge collection.

Gill and I collaborated on a number of events in the past, both virtual and in person, and I hope to use this format a few more times – there are so many poets who want to celebrate Gill and her achievement (one of many). She was so helpful, enthusiastic, talented and knowledgeable, and we miss her terribly.

If you wish to attend the reading, please email me, irena@in-words.co.uk, and I will send you a Zoom invitation, as well as further information, nearer the time.

Natan Barreto was born in Salvador, Brazil. He has lived in Rio, Paris, Rome, and, since 1992, in London, where he works as a primary school teacher. He is the author of seven collections of poetry in Portuguese. Fluent in many languages, he has also published a novel and a volume of translations from French of work by Madagascan writer Jean-Joseph Rabearivel.

David Bottomley is an award-winning poet, playwright and librettist with a passion for environmental and ecological conservation. His play Waterton’s Wild Menagerie was a finalist of the Nick Darke Award; Britain for Breakfast, finalist Enter Stage Write Award and Limboland, finalist at Herts and Essex Playwriting Festival. His plays have been performed at Edinburgh, Manchester, San Diego Fringe Festivals, Birmingham and London theatres. He works nationally and internationally with composers to set his writing to music. He was commissioned by the charity Rising Tides to write the environmental play King Neptune and the Mermaid. David recently obtained an MA in Opera Making and Writing at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, for which he was commissioned to write the opera Lanternfish.

Wendy French has three collections of poetry published: Splintering the Dark (Rockingham Press, 2005), surely you know this (Tall Lighthouse, 2009), and Thinks Itself A Hawk (Hippocrates Press, 2016), the latter resulting from her time as Poet in Residence at the UCH Macmillan Cancer Centre, 2014-2015. She was joint editor with Dilys Wood of Fanfare (Second Light, 2015), a book of poems written by women poets, and also co-edited The Hippocrates Book of the Heart (Hippocrates Press, 2017) with Prof Michael Hulse and Prof Donald Singer. She won the Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Prize (NHS section) in 2010 and was awarded second prize in 2011. Her collaboration with Jane Kirwan resulted in the book Born in the NHS (Hippocrates Press, 2013). She has judged or co-judged three major poetry competitions: the Torbay International Competition, the Torriano Competition and the Tongues and Grooves 10-year celebration competition, as well as the Hippocrates International Poetry Competition for poems relating to medicine or the body. For the past twenty years she has facilitated creative writing in healthcare settings, having finished her formal teaching career as head of the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital School in 2003.

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic, with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She is twice winner of the London Writers Competition, with a third prize in the National Poetry Competition. Her publications include Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station, The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), and The Idea of Islands (Occasional Press). Swimming to Albania, her fourth collection, was published by Salmon Press in 2021, and Pushkin Press published her fourth novel Flatlands in 2023. Twenty of her poems were included in An Anthology: Carcanet 2000. Her poetry has been recorded for The Poetry Sound Archive, read on Poetry Please, The Verb and Front Row, and appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, as well as in The Irish Times and The Observer. She has published a collection of short stories, Rothko’s Red (Salt), and two novels, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and Girl in White (Cinnamon Press), for which she received a major Arts Council Award. Her third novel, Rainsongs, was published in 2018 to great critical acclaim from The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent and The Jewish Chronicle, among many others. As an art critic she has written regularly for many leading newspapers and art magazines. Her selected art writings, Adventures in Art, are published by Other Criteria. As The Poetry Society’s only Public Art Poet, she was responsible for London’s largest public art poem, ‘Eurydice’, in the IMAX tunnel at Waterloo, commissioned as part of the South Bank regeneration.

A retired Scottish support teacher for young people with additional needs, Maggie MacKay took up her writing again and began a thrilling new life. After studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, her pamphlet The Heart of the Run (Picaroon Poetry 2018) with Kate Garrett was followed by her debut collection A West Coast Psalter (Kelsey Books 2021). In 2020 her poem ‘How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt’ was awarded a place in the Poetry Archive’s WordView permanent collection and was a runner up in The Liverpool Prize. Steve Cawte at Impspired Press published her second collection The Babel of Human Travel in November 2022. She reviews poetry collections and pamphlets at The Friday Poem (https://thefridaypoem.com). Maggie loves a good malt and cool jazz as much as daydreaming on the sofa with Hattie, her marvellous rescue greyhound.

Marion McCready lives in Argyll. Her poems have been published widely including in Poetry (Chicago), Edinburgh Review, The Glasgow Herald and have appeared in multiple anthologies. Her pamphlet collection Vintage Sea was published by Calder Wood Press (2011). She is the winner of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and the author of two poetry collections from Eyewear Publishing: Tree Language (2014) and Madame Ecosse (2017). Her most recent collection, Look to the Crocus, was published by Shoestring Press in 2023.

Hugh McMillan is a well published, anthologised and broadcast poet, writer and performer who lives in South West Scotland. His last collection Haphazardly in the Starless Night was published by Luath Press in 2021 and Diverted to Split, his latest, is due out in summer 2024. In 2021 he was appointed editor of the Scottish Poetry Library’s anthology ‘Best Scottish Poems’ and was also chosen to be a Saltire Society judge for Best Scottish Poetry Collection of the Year. His cult classic ‘McMillan’s Galloway’ was reprinted in paperback form in May 2023, and ‘Whit If’, his Scottish History poems are to be reprinted in April 2024. His website is at https://www.hughmcmillanwriter.co.uk/

Jill Sharp has worked as a tutor with the Open University and has also taught excluded teenagers. Her poetry has been published in many magazines including Acumen, Envoi, The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, Mslexia, Prole, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand, and Under the Radar. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, most recently Pale Fire (Frogmore Press) and Contemporary Gothic Verse (Emma Press), as well as online at And Other Poems, Ink, Sweat and Tears and London Grip. Her pamphlet Ye gods was published by Indigo Dreams (2015), and she was one of six poets in Vindication, an anthology from Arachne Press (2018). Her poem ‘Cemetery crow’ was placed joint-second in the 2020 Keats-Shelley Prize. Jill was a founder member of Swindon’s BlueGate Poets, and she has run regular writing workshops at the Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate.