Feb 5, 2010 - Joe Duggan and Harry Zevenbergen

   8.00pm - Alington House        

Joe Duggan was a founder member of the Bunch of Chancers Poetry Group, Derry, touring throughout Ireland and New York State. His first collection, fizzbombs, was published by Tall Lighthouse in 2008. In 2009 he was highly commended in the Forward Prize and performed at Latitude Festival. A regular performer on the London poetry circuit, he currently lives at the top of the Crystal Palace television mast, addressing his fear of heights.

Harry Zevenbergen is a distinguished Dutch performance poet. He was official city poet of The Hague between 2007 and 2009 and his work has been published in numerous anthologies, magazines and newspapers. In 2004 his first major collection, Punk in Rhenen, was launched. His work is rich in political satire, the tone of his poems alternating between heartfelt sadness and absurdist hilarity.

Friday 26 February                Colin Simms and Jacob Polley

   8.00pm - Alington House  

Colin Simms lives in the north of England, with journeys throughout the northern hemisphere, wherever his objectives live - his homes have been where the martens, otters, birds of prey and other enthusiasms are. Not an orthodox conservationist, he upholds the privacy, ‘isness’, for wildlife which modern trends deny - also a concern for precise observation, apposite language and cadence.

o gyr screams on sudden take-off
loneliest of landforms, emotion
we make a bird of the remoteness
peopled as if by giants, by this
such birds of their kind
and of their stormwind-kind only,
none heard like this one

(The largest of the falcons speaks : June 24, 1998)

Jacob Polley was born in Carlisle in 1975. He’s the author of two collections of poetry with Picador, The Brink (2003) and Little Gods (2006). His first novel with Picador, Talk of the Town, came out in 2009. He co-wrote the short film Flickerman and the Ivory-skinned Woman with the director Ian Fenton. In 2002 he won an Eric Gregory award and the Radio 4/Arts Council First Verse award. Selected as one of the Next Generation of British poets in 2004, he was Visiting Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, 2005-7.

Friday 19 March                    Jane Draycott and Siân Hughes

   8.00pm - Alington House  

Poet and teacher Jane Draycott lectures in creative writing at the Universities of Reading, Oxford, and Lancaster. Her numerous collections include No Theatre (1997) and Christina the Astonishing (1998), with Lesley Saunders. Prince Rupert’s Drop (1999) and The Night Tree (2004) were both PBS Recommendations. ‘Jane Draycott’s quiet, meticulous poems inhabit the vague, evanescent world between waking and sleeping. Her vision is of an England half in dream, a Samuel Palmer twilight in which things begin to move into an unexpected focus’ (TLS).

Siân Hughes began writing poetry in 1994 and in 1996 won the TLS/Poems on the Underground competition. In 2006 she won first prize in the Arvon poetry competition with ‘The send-off’, an elegy for her third child. Her début collection The Missing was published by Salt in 2009. ‘Most minds retreat from the scenes of our greatest fears: from the children’s ward, the hospital graveyard, the defeat of love. Siân Hughes, on the contrary, advances . These fine, bare, desolate poems are the result; each one as arresting, rare, and compelling as the truth’ (Kate Clanchy).