20 December

Poetry @ the Print Room

Readings from Ruth Padel and Jacob Polley.

This November Chatto and Windus will publish an enchanting full-length narrative poem, TIDINGS by Ruth Padel, which takes us round the world at Christmas and it is from this that she will read. It’s Christmas Eve and on this enchanted night Charoum, the Angel of Silence, can speak. As night turns to day, he unfolds a resonant story of a little girl, a homeless man and a fox… This is Christmas in all its magic, reminding us that it is a time not only of good tidings, but of loneliness and longing, compassion and connection.

Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Reader in Poetry at King’s College London. Her most recent collections include Darwin: A Life in Poems on her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin, The Mara Crossing on migration and immigration, and Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth on the Middle East. She lives in London.

‘A poet of great eloquence and delicate skill, an exquisite image-maker who can work wonders with the great tradition of line and stanza. Her voice has an astonishing resonance.’ Colm Toibin

 

Jacob Polley was born in Cumbria. His poetry and fiction is published by Picador and has won both the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. He teaches at Newcastle University.

Jacob has a fourth book of poems, Jackself, out in November 2016. Jackself sees Jacob at the height of his powers. In one of the most original books of poetry to appear in the last decade, Jackself spins a kind of ‘fictionalized autobiography’ through nursery rhymes, riddles and cautionary tales, and through the many ‘Jacks’ of our folktale, legend, phrase and fable – everyman Jacks and no one Jacks, Jackdaw, Jack-O-Lantern, Jack Sprat, Cheapjack and Jack Frost. At once playful and terrifying, lyric and narratively compelling, Jackself is an unforgettable exploration of an innocence and childhood lost in the darker corners of Reiver country and of English folklore, and once more shows Polley as one of the most remarkable imaginations at work in poetry today. Jacob has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2016.

‘Poetry that imbues the everyday, the tarnished and burnished, with the possibilities of the transcendent.’ The Guardian