Susie Campbell with Laura Varnam REWEAVING THE POEM

Reweaving the Poem

Join us for poetry and conversation at the Oxford launch of Wastelands, poet Susie Campbell’s new collection (‘absolute goosebumps on first reading’), and celebrate Laura Varnam’s witty and moving Grendel’s Mother Bites Back, Primers 7.

Susie Campbell’s writing has been described as ‘teasing and unsettling’, poems in which ‘the text, the material itself, becomes a site of damage’, while Laura Varnam’s Grendel’s mother is ‘a character and voice that stays with you, singing out into the dark long after you have stopped reading’. Shapeshifters, demonic presences, and monsters haunt the work of both poets, tapping you on the shoulder to demand that you listen or to lead you off the familiar path, as the poets unpick old traditions to reweave a new poetry. Both Susie and Laura reimagine and revisit older texts from a contemporary perspective, weaving together feminist or ecological points of view with modernist and language-based poetic experimentation to reframe some of the great literary texts of the past.

Poetry performances by Susie and Laura will be interwoven with a conversation between them about modernism, monsters, and the medieval in their work. There will be a chaired discussion about how Susie and Laura have rewoven threads drawn from medieval texts and mythologies into new poetic forms, and the audience will have an opportunity to ask questions and to share their thoughts about the new urgency these older literary traditions might have today.

Wastelands

Wastelands by Susie Campbell (Guillemot Press, 2025) takes place on a depleted stretch of the Pilgrims’ Way in West Surrey where much of the environment has been laid waste by industrial extraction, landfill use, and biodiversity loss. Wastelands explores the echoing spaces of this totalised and degraded landscape, hunting for ways to navigate its ruins as well as its emergent spaces and energies. These are wastelands of the spirit as well as of place, they lie at the intersection of the environmental, the existential, and the linguistic. The poems traverse a rubble of quest and pilgrim literature from medieval narratives to Lewis Carroll and TS Eliot in a weave of textual debris, poetic ritual, and more-than-human mappings. The wastelands encountered here are not just haunted, monstrous, and layered places of loss, but are pervasive, restless, and full of their own agency.

Grendel's Mother Bites Back

Laura Varnam’s Grendel’s Mother Bites Back (Primers 7, Nine Arches Press, 2024) is inspired by Grendel's Mother, one of the three antagonists in the Old English epic Beowulf. Silenced, marginalised, and troublesome in the original narrative, these poems reimagine and give voice to the mighty mere-wife, exploring her life (and afterlife) in her own words. Drawing playfully on Old English vocabulary and imagery, the poems are framed by words that drop anchor in her story: ær (before) and æfter (after) her son’s death at Beowulf's hands; as she moves togeanes (towards) her own inevitable fate; and nu (now), in our modern moment of reading, as we remember and celebrate her imaginative power. The poet Adrienne Rich declared that for women in particular, to reimagine or ‘re-vision’ an old text was ‘an act of survival’ and this feminist adaptation project aims to restore to Grendel's Mother the dignity and recognition that she is denied by the original poem, not least by the absence of the mourning rituals that are reserved for men and not for so-called monsters.

The event will be chaired by Professor Kate McLoughlin. Her new book 'Silence: A Literary History' will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2026.

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