Cafe Writers Guests: 8th March 2010
Andrea Porter
Andrea Porter is a
member of the Joy of Six Poetry performance group (www. joyofsix.co.uk) and
has had poems published in many magazines both here and in Canada, Australia
and the USA and has won or been placed in an number of national poetry
competition She has had poems published in the prestigious Forward Book of
Modern Poetry (Faber), the latest being in the latest 2010 edition. She has
had a pamphlet, Bubble, published by Flarestack in 2005 and in April 2009 her
first full collection, ‘A Season of Small Insanities’ was published by
Salt Publishing. Jo Shapcott writes of her work, '
The fascinating cut glass surfaces of her work, always tug against an
undercurrent of darkness and violence.’
Jen Hadfield, winner of the T S
Eliot Prize says of her collection , ‘Like her Shaman, Porter draws survivors and ghosts
about her, and with a hawk's eye for happenstance of living language, she
rewrites myth, catching the white of Shiva's eye, acknowledging both chaos and
random kindness, harm and hilarity.’
Andrea is quite old but not too old and lives in the Fens but she was born in Nottingham, far enough north to ensure she pronounces words such as path, glass and castle with a short a sound.
in front of Josie Hibbert’s tiny Bakelite TV.
Upstairs her Mum was dying of something quiet.
We ran upstairs to tell her and she cried.
in his room still decorated with Noddy wallpaper.
Downstairs his Mum cooked egg and chips
in a long sleeved blouse to hide the bruises.
A TV called to me from a shop window.
Two stores up a shabby man was shouting.
Security was there telling him to move on.
Across from me a girl was smoking roll-ups.
She’d gouged zigzags into both her arms.
We drank tea as she picked at the scabs.
Benjamin Morris
A
native of
has appeared widely in both the US and the UK, and among other awards has
received a commendation
in the National Poetry Competition, a Pushcart nomination, the Chancellor’s
Medal for Poetry and the
Brewer Hall Prize from Cambridge, and recently, a tied-for-third-place entry
in a ‘shark poetry’ contest,
of which he is most proud of all. Recently he co-edited the anthologies Stolen Stories and The Golden
Hour Book volume II, both from Forest Publications in
home with last night—an inventory of
misfiture, an Elvis lighter, the names
of local flora spattered on my shirt, a dove
tied to a ribbon around my foot, cooing
softly as the day invades the window—
what in jasmine’s name were you doing,
you ask, what the lily were you into?
There’s a sapling in the corner of the yard,
soil and spade sidling up to it with no
good intention in their hearts. I don’t know
how that got there, either. Ask the bird.
He’ll tell you—that such mysteries are gifts,
that houses dream of trees, that the King lives.
Daniel Hardisty
Daniel
Hardisty was
born in Bradford, West Yorkshire in 1978. He studied English and
Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia from 1996 to 2000. His poems have
appeared in Poetry Ireland
Review, The Rialto, New Welsh Review, Orbis, Envoi, UEA’s Reactions
series and elsewhere. In 2009
he was chosen for the Jerwood Aldeburgh Seminar for writers working towards
their first collection.
The Escapist
I come from a long line of escapists,
each of us born with the gift of shedding
handcuffs by shrinking the family wrists.
One Uncle watched the Titanic bedding
the soft Atlantic from the last lifeboat,
another woke this side of Little Bighorn
with just an insect-bite pimpling his throat,
a new coat, and his hair neatly shorn.
Then the family brides who vanish down
the O of their wedding bands year on year;
and others, including myself, the clown
who when the time of reckoning drew near,
escaped the exam hall with a window clink
so quiet no butterfly was seen to blink.