Ryan's New & Selected

It’s been a ten-year wait since Gig Ryan’s last collection Heroic Money appeared from Brandl & Schlesinger. This substantial selection takes in work from the late seventies up till now with forty pages or so of new work. It’s been worth the wait and Giramondo have done a great job.

Westminster, October

57 varieties

The 57^th Blue Bus reading took place last night at The Lamb. Emily Critchley and Peter Philpott read individually for the first half then together with a composite work in the second. This was a marvellous piece. For all its disjuncts it seemed as though one person had written the whole thing which was not at all the case. I meant to ask the poets whether or not they intended to publish the work as a unit. It would make a fine book.

graphic

two more London gigs

On Tuesday night the new season of Shearsman readings began with Ian Seed and Linda Black at the Swedenborg Hall.

Then on Wednesday I read with Canadian poet Phil Hall in the Crossing the Line series at The Apple Tree, Clerkenwell. It was a great reading (even if I say so myself). Phil read from a range of books and newer work (his most recent publication is Kildeer, from Book Thug). I read mostly from the Allotments sequence, so it was a kind of launch for the Fewer & Further Press book (thanks to Ann Silversides for the photo).

Learning To Draw

Skylight Press in Gloucestershire has published Basil King’s sequence Learning To Draw/A History. I’ve written on the work in progress elsewhere, in #15 of Big Bridge. Significantly King gave the task of assembling the sections to Daniel Staniforth at Skylight. Significantly because this underlines the fact that this book isn’t an exercise in high modernism: it has a democratic rather than an autocratic provenance. It says ‘enter reader where you wish and read as you wish’.

Davington, October