Poetry Launch | Linda Anderson and John Challis

Wednesday 17th June | 7:30 - 9pm

Poetry Launch: Linda Anderson and John Challis

Acclaimed poets Linda Anderson and John Challis launch their new collections, Against Falling (Pavilion) and The Green Parcel (Bloodaxe Books).

Images of authors John Challis and Linda Anderson | Images provided by promoter

Linda Anderson’s first collection, The Station Before, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney first collection prize. Poems in her new collection, Against Falling, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, are bound together by the idea of the ‘unfinished’. Some undermine the dominance of the ending in stories, emphasizing instead the hinterland of before that exists in silence or hesitation. Others question the ‘pastness’ of the past as memories come back not only to haunt but to reveal something new or unrecognized.

The rural terrain of John Challis’s second collection provides a new lens for exploring history, class and work, our relationship to the natural world, and cycles of growth and decay. Much of his debut, The Resurrectionists, concerned working lives in the city. Here, we find ourselves beyond, in backyards, on motorways, in fields, searching for a green patch where an East End family picked hops in the summer. These poems acknowledge and reckon with the people and places that haunt us, while reflecting on fatherhood and freedom.

A LIVE Lit & Phil Event | FREE

(If you would prefer to book directly over the phone, please call the Library Desk team on 0191 232 0192 and they will be happy to help)

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