The Birthday Party – Nine Arches Press are 3!
Sunday April 10th 2011
The Birthday Party – Nine Arches Press are 3!
£6.50/£5 / 5.45pm / Recital Hall, Birmingham Conservatoire, Paradise Place, Birmingham B3 3HG
Celebrate the third birthday of West Midlands-based independent poetry press, Nine Arches Press, with a special showcase of their most recent poets and publications. Since 2008, they have published 16 collections, 7 copies of Under the Radar magazine, and gained 4 national and regional prizenominations. They also run events, workshops, open mics and readings.
Join poets Myra Connell, Luke Kennard, Ruth Larbey and Claire Crowther to blow out the candles! (www.ninearchespress.com)
CLAIRE CROWTHER
Claire Crow
ther’s two collections, Stretch of Closures and The Clockwork Gift (Shearsman Books), have been received with wide acclaim, and have been followed up be her Nine Arches Press pamphlet, Mollicle. She was born and grew up in Hobs Moat near Solihull. Mollicle is zesty, mysterious and mischievous, the ordinary world turned kaleidoscopic and rearranged in Crowther’s distinct and elegant fashion.
ther’s two collections, Stretch of Closures and The Clockwork Gift (Shearsman Books), have been received with wide acclaim, and have been followed up be her Nine Arches Press pamphlet, Mollicle. She was born and grew up in Hobs Moat near Solihull. Mollicle is zesty, mysterious and mischievous, the ordinary world turned kaleidoscopic and rearranged in Crowther’s distinct and elegant fashion. Praise for Mollicle:
“Claire Crowther’s work is wittily compelling, a complex music. Poems by Crowther are events. With equal power, Mollicle reflects the outer world and the mind’s life, intensely illuminated.
day and night, repay your loan:
shine with sun’s compulsive light. ”
- Alison Brackenbury
“Claire Crowther’s poems employ what seems to be a singular form of logic – each one is like a mirror she has handed you in which you see something familiar, yet in a way you hadn’t managed to see before.”
– Roddy Lumsden
RUTH LARBEY
Ruth Larbey was born in Cyprus, and grew up in Nottingham, Hong Kong and rural Cumbria. She has spent her last two years working at an international development charity in London, after completing her MA at Warwick University in 2008. Funglish is her debut pamphlet of poems, and is a maiden voyage alive with the simple thrill of exploration, re-imagining liminal spaces into new territories vibrant with possibility.
Praise for Funglish
“There’s a drastic incandescence to Ruth Larbey’s syntax which pulls you into her poetry. Writing with an edgy control reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, her poems create exacting ‘electric constellations’ of vision and nerve in which no word is wasted, no darkness left unexplored. As Dickinson wrote, ‘A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.’ Ruth Larbey’s language is alive and gravid.” - David Morley
LUKE KENNARD
Luke Kennard won an Eric Gregory award in 2005 for his first collection of prose poems The Solex Brothers (Stride Books). His second collection of poetry The Harbour Beyond the Movie was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007 making him the youngest poet ever to be nominated for the award. His criticism has appeared in Poetry London and The T
imes Literary Supplement. He is currently reviewing fiction for The National.
Luke Kennard’s Planet-Shaped Horse is an unhinged black-comedy poem-play from one of contemporary poetry’s most unique voices. Both terrible and beautiful things happen. Hermits and doctors are not what they seem and neither Miranda nor Simon seem capable of reining in or reforming their unreliable narrator…
Praise for Luke Kennard:
His language is exciting and it feels to me that he’s a truly 21st-century writer, taking inspiration from all over the place, unafraid of barriers and conventions. – Ian McMillan, The Times
Inventive, academically aware, fearless and hugely enjoyable.
– Nick Laird, The Telegraph
Luke Kennard writes vibrant, original poems that stick in your mind for a long time and enliven your imagination.
- Sophie Hannah
MYRA CONNELL
Myra Connell’s second collection of poems, From the Boat, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2010. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, and her short stories in two collections from Tindal Street Press, Her Majesty and Are You She?
She lives in Birmingham and has two grown-up sons.
From the Boat comes from a time of waiting, of mourning, and of finding small consolations. They are, many of them, small poems, the opposite of heroic. Bare, spare in mood, and exploring a sense of dislocation and disorientation, they look coldly at what is left when almost everything is pared away.
Myra Connell’s poetry is measured yet generous; experimental and adventurous; sharp, often angry, and yet tender.
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