A Huge thank you to Bridgnorth Writer’s Group and Friends who have invited Fair Acre Press to their event on May 6th 2017, at Priory Hall, MUch Wenlock
For more details about the whole event, see the “poster at the bottom of this post…
But meanwhile – here is a description of our event!:
FAIR ACRE PRESS presents :
Keith Chandler who will read both new poems, and older poems that have been placed in the National Poetry Competition 2012, and been published in his earlier collections by Carcanet, Redbeck Press, Oxford University Press and Peterloo.
David Calcutt and Nadia Kingsley who invite you to journey with them ‘Through the Woods’ – while celebrating the secret lives of ‘Road Kill’ … David Calcutt and Nadia Kingsley show how page poetry should be performed. Quality work delivered with clarity and humour… Heather Wastie
REVIEWS :
Anthony Thwaite (awarded OBE in 1992 for services to poetry) on Keith Chandler’s The English Civil War Part 2:
A spellbinding book – tremendously impressive, entertaining, moving, funny.
And original.
So many poems I come across these days don’t catch my interest – they don’t seem to be ‘about’ anything. These poems are always ‘about’ something.”
Jan Fortune, Envoi magazine – on Keith Chandler’s The Grandpa Years
In The Grandpa Years Keith Chandler continues the Fair Acre Press style of unfussy language with something to say.
A sequence of thirteen poems on the theme of becoming a grandfather and tracing an arc from ultrasound to getting ready to school, this is a whimsical and unashamedly intimate pamphlet from the first line.
But there are serious questions running through this pleasing pamphlet, such as why it is that we become besotted with toddlers..
It is these questions and the recognition of mortality that elevates this sequence from a private tribute to a life-event into a lyrical consideration of change and time.
Katrina Porteous – on Calcutt & Kingsley’s Road Kill
I am hugely impressed.
By concentrating on the small things, really looking at them, Nadia Kingsley and David Calcutt have managed to articulate something enormous.
I like the way the poems speak anonymously (like Wordsworth and Coleridge in ‘Lyrical Ballads’), with the authorship only acknowledged right at the end. This gives a sense of the old political power of the poetry pamphlet, and before that the ballad and broadside tradition.
There is something shamanic, redemptive even, about the progress of the poems into the woods.
It’s also beautifully-produced
Jan Fortune, Envoi Magazine – on Calcutt & Kingsley’s Through the Woods
David Calcutt’s circular path takes us on a journey not only through landscape, from the familiar to the increasingly strange as we look beneath the surface, but also in time, bringing a sense of place-memory to bear in this accomplished five-part sequence….
Pared down, lyrical and elegant, Calcutt’s sequence segues into Nadia Kingsley’s ‘Bridging the Unpath’, with its distinctive timbre and form….
Moving from what’s on the wing, to pond, to night-sky, Kingsley takes us under the skin of place, delivering visceral, precise impressions that constantly shift and allude so that whilst one place is under the microscope we never lose a sense of the wider world… The attention to every detail and to every sound is sustained throughout this accomplished, innovative poem, that picks up the concerns of the first sequence from a wholly different perspective so that the result is not mere echo, but a work that adds to and deepens it.
This is a deeply satisfying, layered work that will bear re-reading.
Nadia Kingsley launched Fair Acre Press in 2011 with their first poetry and art anthology: Shropshire Butterflies – which recently sold out: I would not have had the courage, or the quality of poems – without Bridgnorth Writer’s Group’s support. It was as I edited, project-managed, typeset this book that I discovered my huge love of creating books… www.fairacrepress.co.uk
No comments yet.