Bill Griffiths

Reality Street in conjunction with West House Books has just brought out the Collected Earlier Poems (1966-1980) of Bill Griffiths who died in 2007. It’s a major event in the world of British innovative poetry so you can be sure the weeklies won’t even notice. Last night the volume was launched in London at Birkbeck College and the ‘Cycle’ sequence was read in its entirety by editors Ken Edwards and Alan Halsey together with Geraldine Monk, Sean Bonney, Allen Fisher and Maggie O’Sullivan. Most of the work in the books appeared in small press editions so what’s been available recently has largely been later work: the selection The Mud Fort (Salt), Durham and Other Sequences (West House), A Book of Split Cities, and A Tour of the Fairground (both from Etruscan Books) to name a handful.