Monday 19 July 2010

Last night's Shindiggery

I popped over to Leamington Spa last night for the latest Nine Arches Press Shindig, and a splendid event it was too.

Featured readers were Roz Goddard, Deborah Tyler-Bennett, Maria Taylor and Julie Boden, and they worked very well together. Roz read from her just-launched Nine Arches chapbook The Sopranos Sonnets & Other Poems, and Deborah from her recent Smokestack book, Pavilion. I'm looking forward to reading both, because The Sopranos is a long-time obsession with me, while Deborah's book is themed around British dandies and eccentrics, and you can never have enough of those.

In addition, there were loads of good open mic readers - I'm terrible at remembering names, but I think it was a chap called Nigel Hutchinson who read a really good poem titled Lammergeier. There were some excellent poems from Simon Turner too (I've only just got round to buying his new book, Difficult Second Album), and I read a couple, Cahoots and Drinking With Godberd.

I came away with plenty of new reading material (Roz's, Simon's and Deborah's books), and I'm looking forward to the next Shindig, at The Looking Glass, Braunstone Gate, Leicester, on August 9th. It's billed as Shodfest, and will see the launch of Mark Goodwin's new Nine Arches collection Shod. More details soon...

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