The Sparks

I'm chuffed that my first poetry pamphlet, The Sparks, is selling well thanks to the support of those who attended both the London launch of it alongside Emily Berry's excellent Stingray Fevers; the Sheffield launch with Matthew Clegg, Helen Mort and others; and those who've bought a copy through the tall-lighthouse website. The warm reception that myself and other Pilot poets received at this year's StAnza festival was also great; people chatting and buying copies of pamphlets in the series after the Pilot reading. Cheers.

If any readers of the Wasteland are yet to get a copy however, and are interested, I've some of my own which I'm more than happy to scribble in and send out, UK postage free (£4). Just drop me an email (on my profile page). They're also available from the tall-lighthouse website, along with new pamphlets in the Pilot series by Amy Key and Sarah Lowe, and the just-published Shiver, Alan Buckley's first pamphlet, awarded the Poetry Book Society's Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2009.

Live Poetry in Sheffield

With the shop’s back room packed and excellent readings from Helen Mort, Chris Jones and Frances Leviston, last week’s poetry event at the Oxfam bookshop on West Street, Sheffield was a modest success. It was a pleasant feeling to be promoting Sheffield poets while also making money for such a worthwhile cause – through a mixture of kind donations on the door and book sales, including Helen Mort’s new tall-lighthouse pamphlet, A Pint for the Ghost.

Her performance included a number of poems from this new collection - eerie and provocative pieces on the ghosts and pubs of Sheffield and Derbyshire, past and present - and a handful from her first, the shape of every box, including an atmospheric poem about Division Street, located only a stone’s throw from the venue. Unsurprisingly, copies of her new pamphlet were quickly snapped up after the reading.

Chris Jones also performed a wide selection of his published poetry to date, from affecting vignettes about his young son from his pamphlet Miniatures, to powerful poems on his time spent as writer-in-residence at a prison, as well as pieces on the themes of family, friends and home, from his first collection The Safe House.

The evening finished with a reading by Frances Leviston, who read a selection of thought-provoking and vivid poems mainly from her first collection, Public Dream, including the meditative ‘I Resolve to Live Chastely’ and ‘Scandinavia’, an unusual love poem entitled ‘Gliss’, and ‘The Fortune Teller’, an update to, and reworking of, Richard Wilbur’s ‘The Mind Reader’. We were also treated to a few new poems, including a short, suggestive lyric, ‘Two Owls’.

I also gave a shortish reading on the night, and since it seems to have become a bit of a feature on UK poetry blogs, here’s my ‘set list’:

1. Crux
2. Sunday
3. Filter
4. Home
5. The River Don
6. Familiar
7. Wednesday
8. Gesleham-on-Stour
9. Itch
10. Hex

Given the success of the night, I hope to help arrange something similar again with Oxfam – though perhaps in a bigger venue than the shop, as that back room can get quite stuffy at times. If I do, it’ll be posted up here closer to the time of course. For now, thanks again to everyone who read, and also to all who attended – a fun night.

Tonight: Oxfam Poetry - Four Sheffield Poets

Oxfam Poetry Night @ Oxfam Bookshop (West St / Glossop Rd)

featuring four Sheffield poets:
Frances Leviston, Chris Jones, Helen Mort, and Ben Wilkinson

Tonight (Wednesday 15th July), 6.30pm - 9pm

£2.50 donation on the door and free poetry CD

A Pint for the Ghost

photograph by Katie Utting

A fair few poetry readers who drop by these parts might already know of Helen Mort, a Sheffield-born, Cambridge-based poet who won a Gregory Award in 2007. Her first pamphlet of poems, the shape of every box, was published the same year, and I'd recommend getting hold of a copy if you can - it's a good read full of distinctive, musical, lyric poems that are accessible, candid and sometimes marked by deft, even dark, humour.

But Mort also has a new pamphlet in the pipeline, and one which is rather unusually accompanied by a "one-woman poetry show": A Pint for the Ghost. This, as the show's curious blog states, "is set in a deserted pub after hours where strange characters come to introduce themselves. From the phantom miner at Hanging Flatt to the spirit in the hospital x-ray machine, the ghosts of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire saunter in for a drink with me. Join us at the bar when the show is finished later in 2009."

It promises to be an unmissable event, then, including music, poems and stories, and will be touring around the country from late 2009 through 2010, so worth looking out for if it's going to be at a venue near you (and by the sounds of things, it won't all be in the sorts of venues you might expect...).

In the meantime, do check out the A Pint for the Ghost blog, which features sample poems from the pamphlet and show, and posts on everything from the derelict pubs of modern London to Mort's favourite drinking haunts from across the country. Mine's a pint at The Devonshire Cat.

Oxfam Poetry Night - Four Sheffield Poets

Oxfam Poetry Night @ Oxfam Bookshop (West St / Glossop Rd)

featuring four Sheffield poets:
Frances Leviston, Chris Jones, Helen Mort, and Ben Wilkinson

Wednesday 15th July, 6.30pm - 9pm

£2.50 donation on the door and free poetry CD