Still European

STILL EUROPEAN – Thursday 25 February 2021 at 7.30 on Zoom

However you feel about ‘having got brexit done’ (personally, I am gutted…), I want to celebrate the diverse languages, artforms and culture of Europe with an evening of words, images and more words.

In collaboration with the Mary Evans Picture Library in Blackheath and thanks to its Poetry and Pictures Blog, curated by Gill Stoker, we shall hear Sarah Lawson, Fiona Moore, Gabriel Moreno, John McCullough, Emma Page, Jacqueline Saphra and Richard Westcott read their poems on a European theme and show the pictures that inspired them. They will also read their favourite European poem in translation and, wherever possible, in the original.

Free by invitation. Email irena.mh50(at)gmail.com to be sent a zoom link the day before the event.

Sarah Lawson is a poet and translator. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and in her collections Below the Surface and All the Tea in China. She has published three poetry pamphlets with Hearing Eye: Down Where the Willow Is Washing Her Hair, Friends in the Country and Twelve Scenes of Malta and a collection of haiku, The Wisteria’s Children. She has translated works from French, Spanish and Dutch, and is probably the only person to have translated both Christine de Pisan (The Treasure of the City of Ladies, Penguin Classics, 1985) and Jacques Prévert (Selected Poems, Hearing Eye, 2002). She has held a C. Day Lewis Fellowship and was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2005.

Fiona Moore‘s first collection The Distal Point (published by Happenstance) was shortlisted for the 2019 T S Eliot prize and the Seamus Heaney first collection prize.  She is a board member for the poetry magazine Magma and was lead editor for Magma’s 2018 Climate Change issue.  Fiona is based in Greenwich and campaigns locally on environmental issues, e.g. against the Silvertown Tunnel.  She moved to the Outer Hebrides in late 2019 to spend a year there, writing and exploring, but has stayed on for longer because of Covid.  She is learning one of the lesser known European languages – Gaelic – and speaks several others, having lived and worked in Austria, Poland and Greece. 

Gabriel Moreno was born in Gibraltar. He has a degree in Philosophy and Hispanic Studies from the University of Hull and a Doctorate in Hispanic Literature from the University of Barcelona. Published works in Spanish include ‘Londres y el susurro de las amapolas’ (Omicrón 2007). Works in English include ‘The Hollow Tortoise’ (2012); ‘Nights in Mesogeois’ (Annexe 2013), ‘The Moon and the Sparrow’ (2015) and ‘The Passer-by’ (2018). Gabriel has also released three albums as a singer-songwriter. His latest album ‘Whiskey with Angels’ was played on BBC6 by Cerys Mathews.

John McCullough lives in Hove. His latest book of poems, Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins) won the 2020 Hawthornden prize for literature and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. In the Times Literary Supplement, head judge for the Hawthornden, Christopher Reid, described it as ‘a rare literary phenomenon … a frank and militant declaration of joy.’ John has won other awards including the Polari First Book Prize and his collections have been named Books of the Year in The Independent, The Guardian and The Observer as well as his work often appearing in magazines such as Poetry London, Poetry Review and The New Statesman. He teaches creative writing at the University of Brighton and New Writing South.

Emma Page was born in Yorkshire and has lived in south-east London for almost twenty years. She studied English at Oxford in the early nineties and English in Education at King’s College London ten years later, writing her MA dissertation on the out-of-school personal and creative writing practices of secondary school students. She is an experienced English teacher who currently works as an education writer, private tutor and writing coach. Her writing is inspired by many things including her experiences as a woman and mother, the arts and the lives of artists, nature and the environment, and her longstanding interest in juvenilia and the creativity of children. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry London (ed. Colette Bryce) and The Best British Poetry 2011 (ed. Roddy Lumsden), and in the online journals Berfrois and iamb. She is currently working on a novel for children, and towards her first poetry pamphlet.

Jacqueline Saphra’s The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye 2011)was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing but Naked Women (The Emma Press 2014) won the Saboteur Award for Best Collaborative Work. All My Mad Mothers (Nine Arches Press 2017)was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. Two of her sonnet sequences A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller (2017) and Veritas: Poems After Artemisia (2020) are published by Hercules Editions. Her third collection, Dad, Remember You Are Dead was published by Nine Arches Press in 2019 and her latest book, One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets has just been published by Nine Arches Press. She is a founder member of Poets for the Planet, lives in London, teaches at The Poetry School and is Still European.

Richard Westcott, now retired from a happy and fulfilled lifetime of NHS doctoring, no longer has any excuse for not writing poetry. His poems have appeared in all sorts of places like buses, shop windows and on walls, along with more conventional anthologies and magazines – even winning an occasional prize here and there – and his well-received pamphlet entitled There They Live Much Longer is published by Indigo Dreams.

He blogs at www.richardwestcottspoetry.com

Events

Tuesday October 8th: ‘Loving Nature in Troubled Times’
7pm at West Greenwich Library

As close as we could to National Poetry day, the launch of Derrick Porter’s and Jude Rosen’s new poetry collections (The Art of Timing and Reclamations from London’s Edgelands respectively, both with Paekakariki Press), who will be joined by Alex Josephy and Jane McLaughlin.

A free event. Books and pamphlets will be available to buy. Plenty of refreshments (donations welcome). Door will open at 6.45 for a 7pm start.

Here’s some information about the poets:

Before moving to Rye, Alex Josephy lived in London and sometimes in Italy. Now her imagination and her poems live in three different worlds; she feels lucky to be discovering a new one among the East Sussex marshlands. Alex has worked as a teacher and university lecturer and as an NHS education adviser. Her most recent collection is Again Behold the Stars, a Cinnamon Press pamphlet award winner, 2023. Other work includes Naked Since Faversham (Pindrop Press, 2020) and White Roads (Paekakariki Press, 2018). Her poems have won the McLellan and Battered Moons prizes, and have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK, Italy and India. You can find out more on her website: www.alexjosephy.net

Jane McLaughlin writes and publishes poetry and short stories. Her publications with Cinnamon Press include Quintet (poetry with four other poets); Quartet (short stories with three other authors) and Lockdown (prizewinning full poetry collection). Her short stories have been widely published by Arachne Press, The Frogmore Papers, Under the Radar and elsewhere. Her short story ‘Trio for Four Voices’ was included in Best British Short Stories 2018 (Salt). She has been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and has been placed and listed in many other competitions. Ephemeral, her collection of thirty poems on the themes of climate emergency and the natural world was one of the winners of the Dreich Classic Chapbook competition in 2023. Phil Barnett writes of Ephemeral: These fine poems are like breaths on a window pane. Her words condense the ineffable…into something we can see, read, feel.

Derrick Porter grew up in Hoxton and why he began to write poetry from the age of thirteen remains one of life’s unsolved mysteries. From the time he first began to write, to well into his thirties, he wrote in ignorance of there being a poetry scene. In his early forties he joined a ‘Writing for Pleasure’ group tutored by the poet Ted Walter – the first poet he ever met. Ted suggested he send his poems to Envoi, and from then on Derrick’s poems began to appear alongside mainstream poets. In 2002 he joined the Poetry School where – under the guidance of Mimi Khalvati – he became part of the wider poetry scene. His poems have appeared in magazines such as Magma, Acumen, Interpreter House, The New Writer, Brittle Star, Poetry Review, The Long Poem Magazine, and in two anthologies: I Am Twenty People, and This Little Stretch of Life. He has also enjoyed success in a number of poetry competitions. His second collection, The Art of Timing, is coming out in September for Paekakariki Press.

Jude Rosen is a former historian, urban researcher and translator and as a poet currently runs workshops for refugees. Her pamphlet, A Small Gateway, (Hearing Eye, 2009) explored East End Jewish life and intercultural exchange with Berlin, Sarajevo, Palestine. At the moment she is writing a long sequence on Gaza. Reclamations from London’s Edgelands,  which emerged from artistic resistance to the Olympic redevelopment, has recently been published by Paekakariki Press (May 2024). Poems from it appeared in The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London’s Olympic State, (Marshgate Press, 2012); Long Poem Magazine, South Bank Poetry London Poems Anthology and Envoi and were performed on poem and living history walks of the marshes, 2015-19 (poemswalks.wordpress.com). A video “Desire Paths – a film haibun” of a walk on Leyton Marsh was produced by Fawzia Kane in 2016 (https://vimeo.com/197324168).

NOVEMBER 26th – an evening with poets who write in English while English is not their native language – with Natan Barreto, Isabel Bermudez and Kostya Tsolakis (and more).

FEBRUARY 4 – readings by Jacqueline Saphra and Sue Rose