Poetry @ The Print Room - Emily Berry

Emily Berry is a poet, freelance writer and editor. She grew up in London and studied English Literature at Leeds University and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. An Eric Gregory Award winner in 2008, she co-edits the anthology series Stop Sharpening Your Knives and is a contributor to The Breakfast Bible (Bloomsbury 2013), a compendium of breakfasts. Her début poetry collection Dear Boy (Faber & Faber, 2013) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was short-listed for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.

On December 16^th Emily will be reading at The Print Room for our fourth night in a series of successful poetry evenings along with Daljit Nagra and Maurice Riordan.

Check out her website here:

http://www.emilyberry.co.uk/

And get a sneak peek into the evening by listening to her read from her début collection Dear Boy here:

“Emily Berry's debut is a treat. She is a new yet anything but hesitant voice. What is stimulating is that she approaches poetry as a flexible, permissive, dynamic ally. She seems to have complete freedom with form, and will use a poem whenever helpful as a vehicle for escape. A getaway car ... Berry's range is amazing.”

                                                    Kate Kellaway for The Observer

Poetry @ The Print Room -- Helen Mort

Five-times-winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, Helen Mort received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Ancherster Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she was poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.

"Helen Mort is among the brightest stars in the sparkling new constellation of young British poets" (Carol Ann Duffy)

For Poetry @ The Print Room, Helen will be reading from her eagerly anticipated first collection Division Street.

 ‘this is a collection that cherishes specificity: the particularity of names; the reflections the world throws back at us; the precise moment of a realisation. Distinctive and assured, these poems show us how, at the site of conflict, a moment of reconciliation can be born.’

"Gritty, witty, stylish and totally memorable. Division Street is a book which has something important to say, addressing a wide range of topics with novelty and intelligence." (John Glenday)

Poetry @ The Print Room - Jean Sprackland

Poetry @ The Print Room continues on Thursday 10 October, 7.30pm, with acclaimed poets Jean Sprackland, Christopher Reid and Helen Mort.  This will be our third evening in our series of Poetry events.

In the upcoming weeks we will be explaining a little more about what you can expect from each poet, this week:

Jean Spackland and her new poetry collection Sleeping Keys

In 2007 Sprackland won the Costa Poetry Award, with her first collection, Tilt, in which she looks back at endings and beginnings: the end of a life, old homes lived in and left and new homes discovered.  The poems speak of the paralysis and bewilderment of knowing something is over, and of the strangely significant, almost votive nature of the things that are left behind.

Her new collection, Sleeping Keys is a book of transitions – domestic and emotional – and it explores how the experience of change is painful, disorientating, even catastrophic, but also profoundly necessary and revelatory.  Change brings with it the hope that love can be recovered out of the ruins; change, in fact, is a creative, healing force that shows us we have been living amoung ruins – that even in the face of grief and loss there are ‘spectral futures / we must stride the ditch to reach’.

Full of exact, vivid, clear-eyed observations of a world of failure and flux, Sleeping Keys also illuminates a future world beyond.  For every object left emptied of significance, bereft, Jean Sprackland shows us another that’s charged and radiant with possibility – the possibility of miracles.



‘When Sprackland opens her poems up…both to metaphorical possibility and responsibility, her lyric energies are uncompromised and resolutely shine’ - Guardian

As a little taster check out this video of Spackland talking about her award winning first collection, Tilt: