Malcolm Lowry centenary festival
I am working with Bryan Biggs, Artistic Director at Liverpool’s Bluecoat Arts Centre, to develop plans for a festival celebrating the centenary of Wirral-born writer Malcolm Lowry in 2009. Lowry, whose masterpiece Under the Volcano ought to feature on every list of great twentieth-century novels, described Liverpool as ‘that terrible city whose main street is the ocean’. The Bluecoat will be the centre of a festival – including visual arts, film, live literature events and an accompanying book – aimed at bringing Lowry and his work to a wide audience and restoring him to his rightful place in the pantheon of writers hailing from the north west.
Latest news on this is that Bryan and I have started work on putting together the book, provisionally entitled Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World, and including contributions from an exciting line-up of creative writers, artists, and Lowry scholars. More details very soon!
Poetry collection
As you can read in my blog, I have recently published my first collection of poetry. Titled Telling the Fractures, the book is a collaboration with photographer Alan Ward and is published by Axis Projects. To find out more and to order a copy, click here. To read some of my poems, please go to the Poems page. I am just beginning to do some readings to promote the book, which is a new and exciting – if a little nerve-wracking – departure for me.
Jeffrey Wainwright interview
I have recently interviewed Manchester-based poet Jeffrey Wainwright about his writing and in particular his new collection, Clarity or Death! ( just published by Carcanet). Jeff’s new work is a fascinating and fertile conjunction of poetry and philosophy; you can read the interview in PN Review (July-August 2008).
Poetry in hospital
From September 2006 up till June 2007 Bea Colley and I ran a poetry reading group for patients at the Walton Centre’s Neurological Rehabilitation Unit in Fazakerly, Liverpool. This was part of the groundbreaking project Get Into Reading run by The Reader, which aims to bring the pleasures and benefits of reading aloud and discussing texts in informal groups to the widest possible range of people. Researcher Jude Robinson from the University of Liverpool’s Health and Community Care Research Unit recorded some sessions and conducted a focus group with patients to find out what benefits the group had, and I hope that this research will eventually find its way into print. Anecdotally, though, it was fantastic to see the way that patients – often with very little else to stimulate their minds while in hospital, in some cases for months – responded, usually starting off saying ‘I haven’t read a poem since I left school’ and then joining wholeheartedly in discussions of authors from Seamus Heaney to Edward Thomas to Wendy Cope. We hope that this project will generate some significant data on the ways in which sharing poetry together can help people in the most difficult of circumstances, and help pave the way for other similar projects.
