Annie Freud Poetry Live
Night of the Killer B’s: Simon Barraclough, Alan Buckley & Chris Beckett read and perform their poems with Annie Freud followed by a celebratory supper.
Saturday 19 October 6.30 for 7pm.
Poetry Tickets: £10 / Reserve a table for supper. Main course £10 – 15.
Please phone 01308 459511 to book your tickets and supper.
Tickets are also available from the Bridport Tourist Information Centre but suppers should still be booked direct from Sladers Yard.
SIMON BARRACLOUGH is the author of the Forward-finalist debut, Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt, 2008), Bonjour Tetris (Penned in the Margins, 2010) and Neptune Blue (Salt, 2011).
He is the editor of Psycho Poetica (Sidekick Books, 2012) and co-deviser and author of The Debris Field (Sidekick Books, 2013).
Jurassic Coast
The house had grown too small for us and so
we spent that final summer in a tent.
At first we interlocked our sleeping bags,
each row of teeth zipped into place like cogs,
our limbs and fingers nightly interlaced.
But due to condensation and the dew,
the zips began to snark and twist apart
and you unhooked them, torch between your teeth,
and bundled up your bones in a cocoon
and shifted inches, light years, out of reach.
Your tongue became a pebble, smooth and mute,
mine frayed, a salty beach towel on the strand.
You found an adder’s egg by Durdle Door
and hatched it in your polyester nest
while in the gloom I rode to Casterbridge,
the pages greenly lit by your turned back,
that glowed a weedy hue right through
the segments of your gently humming sac.
I didn’t wait to see what you’d become
but turned my eyes to hard-baked Dorset Knobs.
You scissored your way out, I felt the draught
of autumn winds and newly minted wings.
My heart froze like a goldfinch in its cage
and Chesil Beach began to feel its age.
Simon Barraclough
CHRIS BECKETT grew up in Ethiopia in the 1960s and his collection of African-inspired praise shouts, boasts and laments, Ethiopia Boy, has just been published by Carcanet/Oxford Poets. Commenting on Chris’ poems on The Verb, Ian McMillan said, “In their willingness to cross languages and cultures and expectations of what a poem can be, I’ve not read anything like them before.”
Chris is also busy translating Amharic Ethiopian poets such as Bewketu Seyoum (In Search of Fat, Flipped Eye, 2012), and his translation of Aimé Césaire’s long poem Ethiopie (from the French) is in the summer 2013 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation.
Lion Buses by Chris Beckett
(“giving transport service for the city of Addis Ababa
from 6.15 a.m. to 9 p.m.”)
Nothing-like-a-lion bus!
you who honk and stagger down Progress-
through-Cooperation Avenue
you who lick us with diesel, swaying this way and that
with our shopping and hot flesh
where is your pride, lion bus?
where is the lioness to do your hunting of kudu and goat
while you snooze under a tree?
we don’t believe that lions can be buses!
we don’t believe that painting Anbessa on a bus
in big gold letters changes you
you slow slug of metal
you cramper of knees and buttocks
yes, there are cars that run like the wolf
there are small trucks patient as donkeys
and then there are buses, buses…
ALAN BUCKLEY’s pamphlet “Shiver” (tall-lighthouse) was a Poetry Book Society choice. He has recently had poems published in The Rialto, and in the anthology Days of Roses II. He has won the Wigtown Poetry Competition, been commended twice in the Bridport Prize, and was shortlisted for the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize. He works in Oxford as a psychotherapist, and as a school writer-in-residence for the charity First Story.
Voicemail
for Kate
Although your mobile must be lying still
and unblinking on a bedside table,
or stuffed in a bag with a pointless diary,
tonight I ring it one last time, and hear
your voice, clear, unwavering, as you ask me
to please leave a message after the tone,
and then I try to pretend you’re busy,
writing songs on your scuffed acoustic, or down
in the lush, quiet county you were born in,
hands on the steering wheel’s leopard-print cover,
casually speeding south through a warren
of hedge-bound lanes, stone bridges, up over
Eggardon Hill, to the place you’d go to stare
at the waves, and breathe the incoming air.
Alan Buckley
ANNIE FREUD
The Mirabelles
A young poet visits an older poet who has enjoyed fame and success.
In the street, a plum tree has scattered its golden fruit all over the pavement.
When it’s over, she’ll come back and fill her pockets with these Mirabelles.
She leaves the older poet’s house; night has fallen; she has forgotten
the plums. But the thought of them, lying so sweet all over the pavement,
comes back to her and she remembers them every day for the rest of her life.
Annie Freud was born in London in 1948. She is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud, maternal grand-daughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and the great-grand-daughter of Sigmund Freud. Freud was educated at the Lycee Francais de Londres and then studied English and European Literature at Warwick University. She taught the Advanced Class of the Poetry Writing Course at City University, London. Her first full collection from Picador, The Best Man Who Ever Was, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2007, and went on to receive the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award in the same year. Her latest collection, The Mirabelles, was published by Picador in 2010 and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize in 2011. She is currently teaching the Advanced Class of the Poetry Writing Course at City University, London. She lives in Dorset with her husband.
Phone 01308 459511 to book now!
Sladers Yard 