Do check out these three Poetry Events (below) at Taunton Literary Festival (BrendonBooks)
Tue 14 Nov 2023, 7 PM
An Evening With the Fire River Poets – The Thought of the Heart – Tickets £5
Sat 18 Nov 2023, 7 PM
Readings from Three Live Canon Poetry Competition Winners: Josephine Corcoran, Matt Bryden and Isabella Mead – Tickets £5
Tue 21 November 2023, 6.30 PM
Kalevala – Land of Heroes with Graham Fawcett – Tickets £12.50
Tickets can be obtained from: Brendon Books, Bath Place, Taunton TA1 4ER, Tel: 01823 337742, email brendonbooks@gmail.com
Or online directly from TicketSource
7 PM Tue 14 Nov 2023
An Evening With the Fire River Poets – The Thought of the Heart
Tickets £5 from: Brendon Books, Bath Place, Taunton TA1 4ER Box Office 01823 337742 email brendonbooks@gmail.com or click here
Fire River Poets was founded in Taunton in 1988. The name Fire River was chosen because the name of the River Tone that runs through Taunton appears to be a corruption of tan which meant fire in ancient Celtic. Hardly a fiery river, the Tone does regularly flood, taking on a tawny-reddish colour from the soil it carries with it…
As one of Somerset’s longest-established poetry groups, with a wealth of national recognition in publishing, events and awards, we bring you an evening of ten distinctive poetic voices from around the county. Please join us for an evening that will move, entertain, bring you up short and, above all, press the refresh button in your imaginations.
‘Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.’ Mary Oliver. Poetry can tell us what human beings are. It can tell us why we stumble and fall and how, miraculously, we can stand up. Maya Angelou
‘Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.’ Robert Frost
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7 PM Sat 18 Nov 2023
Readings from Three Live Canon Poetry Competition Winners: Josephine Corcoran, Matt Bryden and Isabella Mead
Tickets £5 from: Brendon Books, Bath Place, Taunton TA1 4ER Box Office 01823 337742 email brendonbooks@gmail.com or click here
Josephine Corcoran has published two poetry pamphlets and a full collection, most recently Love and Stones (Live Canon, 2023). Her work as a short story writer and playwright has been broadcast on BBC R4. Originally from Southport, she now lives in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. Matt Bryden is a poet and teacher living in Devon. He has published a pamphlet Night Porter, a first collection Boxing the Compass and more recently an exploration of fatherhood amidst catastrophe, The Glassblower’s House (Live Canon, 2023). Isabella Mead is Head of Learning and Participation at the Story Museum in Oxford, a Trustee of Jane Austen House and a Poetry Ambassador at Keats House. From 2010 to 2012 she lived and worked in a rural area of Rwanda with Voluntary Service Overseas, an experience documented in Dear Rwanda (Live Canon, 2023). She lives in Bristol with her partner and her cat.
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6.30 PM Tue 21 November 2023
Kalevala – Land of Heroes with Graham Fawcett
Tickets £12.50 from Brendon Books, Bath Place, Taunton TA1 4ER Box Office 01823 337742 email brendonbooks@gmail.com or click here
For poetry lovers anywhere in the world except in Finland, it has, for nearly two hundred years now, been the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius they have to thank for making them aware of the very existence of Kalevala, the Finnish national epic poem created to give the Finns a work to rival Homer. It would later inspire J R R Tolkien to write the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. The young Sibelius, in the 1890s, was carried away by this dramatic, Romantic and mystical poem of 1849, 22,795 lines of heroic journeys, magic feats and fabulous landscapes made infectious by the haunting earworm of its metre, originally translated into what we know as Longfellow’s 1855 Song of Hiawatha rhythm of four beats in an eight-syllable line.
Graham Fawcett worked as a writer, deviser, interviewer and presenter with BBC Radio Three for twenty-five years and has also broadcast on Radio 4, the World Service, and the Italian Service.
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Brendon Books CIC, Bath Place, Taunton, Somerset TA1 4ER
Tel: 01823 337742 Email: brendonbooks@gmail.com