We are absolutely thrilled to welcome David Harsent as our guest poet this month. David has published thirteen volumes of poetry. Legion won the Forward Prize for best collection. Night was triple short-listed in the UK and won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Fire Songs won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A Broken Man in Flower, Harsent’s versions of poems written by Yannis Ritsos while in prison camps and under house arrest, was published by Bloodaxe in 2023. He has also made English versions of C.P. Cavafy and Goran Simic. A new collection. Skin, came from Faber in March 2024.

An architect of sound, Harsent has built a haunting body of work unlike that of any other poet of our time. Formally edgy and musically hypnotic, his poetry over five decades – often cast in intricate narrative sequences – unearths our most intimate desires for people and places, combining a photographic memory with the taste of dream and improvisation. Skin, his 13th collection, contains 10 memorable sequences about silence, our proximity to the dead, and the deep-seated struggle between light and darkness. Harsent’s restlessly inventive poetic forms bear “a fugitive geometry” that houses the enigma of the “seen-unseen, / self-unself, gone into a hare and gone to ground”. The book’s sheer metaphysical reach recalls Shakespeare’s dialectical sonnets, Wallace Stevens’s philosophical soliloquies, and Beckett’s ghostly investigations of love, pain, and silence. “The skylight empty of sky”, Harsent observes, “A line of song etched into the bone.”

David Harsent has collaborated with several composers, though most often with Harrison Birtwistle. Birtwistle/Harsent collaborations have been performed at major venues worldwide, including the Royal Opera House, the Salzburg Festival, the Concertgebouw and Carnegie Hall.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor Emeritus at the University of Roehampton.

As a special extra to the event, there will be a short reading at 7.15pm by Fire River Poet Phil Kirby from his newly published Mariscat Sampler

Martin Figura’s collection and show Whistle were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show.  Shed (Gatehouse Press) and Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine (Cinnamon Press) were both published in 2016.  In 2021 he was Salisbury NHS Writer in Residence; the resulting pamphlet My Name is Mercy (Fair Acre Press) won a national NHS award. A second pamphlet from Fair Acre Press Sixteen Sonnets for Care came out in October 2022. His latest collection The Remaining Men  has just been published by Cinnamon Press. 

 The Remaining Men is a bold, ambitious collection, a Condition of England book, written from the inside and from below the salt. Personal tragedy and loss are part of the larger state of things, while the State as we have understood it since 1945 is collapsing under the weight of the indifference and hostility of those who govern. Figura’s response to these conditions is to keep his attention fixed on the telling detail, the sign of life, the endurance of ‘ordinary’ people. Sentimentality would ruin such a book, but Figura seems to have none of it, and the poems’ richness of feeling emerges from fidelity to craft – to phrasemaking, to comic timing, and to a sense of dramatic life.   Sean O’Brien

Precise and powerful, these are portraits of ordinary and extraordinary lives, interwoven with the poet’s own remarkable story. They form a collection of great intellectual rigour, skill and emotional force – but written with such tenderness, such a light touch, that you are willing to follow him into the most challenging territory. A good thing, because this book will deepen your understanding of the messy business of being alive.  Clare Shaw

Martin Figura’s poems are humane, clear-eyed, and compassionate without the least sentimentality. He has written directly out of people’s lives, particularly in hospitals, in the army and in the workplace. He is the laureate of the ordinary and overlooked. For all those reasons The Remaining Men is a very powerful collection that deserves to be read widely.  George Szirtes

We are delighted to be presenting Annie Fisher at our March FRP Zoom event.

Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as a literacy consultant working across Somerset schools. Now retired, she writes poetry for both adults and children. She has had two pamphlets published by HappenStance Press: Infinite in all Perfections (2016) and The Deal (2020). She is a member of Taunton’s Fire River Poets, and a regular contributor to the online poetry journal, The Friday Poem.

Missing the Man Next Door: The enigmatic ‘man next door’ is a recurring presence in these poems which deal with loss of various sorts. There is an acknowledgement that ‘the living always have unfinished business with the dead’ and that humour is vital as a means of personal survival.

Mariscat Press: ‘Missing the Man Next Door’ is published by Mariscat Press, ‘the jewel in the Scottish poetry crown’ (Ian McMillan). Mariscat has twice won the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award (2023 & 2015). The press is known for its tastefully designed publications and its quality backlist which includes Douglas Dunn, Diana Hendry, Jackie Kay, Michael Longley and Edwin Morgan.

Alasdair’s most recent Shearsman collections are My My My Life (2021) and Words of Mercury (2024). Born in Edinburgh, he began writing in Liverpool in the 1970’s and was given an Eric Gregory Award by the Society Of Authors in 1975. Later he took a 20 year sabbatical from poetry before stating to write again after a career in academic libraries. For 15 years he organised and presented the reading series Uncut Poets in Exeter, where he now lives.

John Richardson has been writing poetry for over 58 years. Trained as a mathematician, he spent 40 years (when not writing poetry) in various national and international IT management roles whilst also training to become psychotherapist and teaching assistant. 
He has given numerous poetry workshops, readings at Bath, Marlbrough, Swindon and Cheltenham Literature Festivals; was a founder member of Swindon’s BlueGate poets, FTLOP (for the love of poetry) and the Brokenbrough poetry group. During Covid he setup the Round-Robins, a monthly poetry email critique community. 
In 2011-12 he published the free, quarterly, online ekphrastic poetry, IMPpress e-zine. He has published several pamphlets of his own and other poets’ work. His most recent work, from which he’ll be reading, is crossing over about ghosts andincludes QR links to his recordings.

Sarah Barr lives in Dorset, writes poetry and fiction, is a Poetry Society Stanza rep, leads writing groups and mentors writers. She taught creative writing and social sciences for the Open University and worked as a counsellor. She often writes about relationships and the environment. She was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2023. Among prizes won for her poems are 1^st in the Frogmore and National Memory Day competitions, 2^nd in Poetry on the Lake and shortlisted in various others including the Bridport Prize.  Her poetry appears in many magazines and anthologies. She has published 2 poetry pamphlets: ‘January’ (2020, Maytree Press) and ‘Hawthorn’ (2024, Hedgehog Press) and a collection of short fiction, ‘Night Zoo’ (2022, Valley Press).

Dave Wakely has worked as a musician, university administrator, librarian, learning materials author and editor in cities across Europe. His writing has been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize and for the Cambridge and Bath Short Story awards, and his stories and poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Online Programme Manager for Milton Keynes Literary Festival, he lives in Buckinghamshire with his husband.

Isabella Mead’s debut pamphlet Dear Rwanda was published in 2023 with Live Canon. She has won 9 poetry competitions including the Wells (2019), Bedford (2020), the Julian Lennon Poetry Prize (2021), Ver (2022), Telegraph (2022) and Prole Laureate (2022). She has been twice Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize,  longlisted for the National Poetry Competition and was a 2021 Brotherton finalist. Her poetry has appeared in Mslexia, Magma, The Telegraph, Ink Sweat & Tears and Anacapa Review. She is Artistic Director & Joint CEO of the Poetry School, and a Trustee of Jane Austen House. In April 2024 she was Poet in Residence at Spitzbergen Arts Centre in Svalbard.