Join Bookends on Thursday 26th September at 7.30pm at Cakes and Ale Cafe, Carlisle for an evening of poetry with Kelly Davis and Kerry Darbishire.
Kelly will be reading from ‘The Lost Art of Ironing’.
In The Lost Art of Ironing, the metaphorical iron smooths out life’s creases as well as crumpled clothes, with poems about women as lovers, wives, mothers, muses, and editors and curators of their own lives.
Kelly Davis gives us meditations on other writers, including playful new perspectives on famous poems by Eliot and Keats. She considers being Emily Dickinson’s best friend and recalls the intoxicating experience of reading Anne Sexton’s poetry for the first time. She imagines George Sand and her lover Frédéric Chopin on an ill-fated holiday and listens in to the thoughts of Lisa Gherardini (better known as ‘the Mona Lisa’). She also writes, with warmth and honesty, about her family and the small West Cumbrian town where she lives. The collection ends with five modern versions of Shakespeare’s best-loved sonnets, looking at time, love and mortality in the digital age, where anyone can create the illusion of eternal youth.
These poems sparkle with wit and wisdom and shed new light on the way women’s lives have changed – and not changed.
Kerry will be reading from ‘River Talk’.
‘River Talk is the Cumbrian water I know and love, a language that has run through me from an early age. River is refuge, friend who holds secrets and heals. Sometimes River is dangerous but always the music to be heard and respected in all its moods.’
‘Kerry Darbishire’s language flows with freedom and fluency, blurring boundaries of the self and the natural world to form landscapes on the page. Sophisticated yet accessible, her poems explore the peripheries of safety and danger, of the earthly and ethereal. Darbishire is an outstanding, original poet.’ Kitty Donnelly
‘An exploration of the life of a river that invites us to come on a watery safari. Darbishire’s fluent and luminous poetic voice is immersive, making us feel we have experienced and understood what it means to inhabit that cool and limpid habitat. Unforgettable.’ Joy Howard, Grey Hen Press
‘Kerry Darbishire has conjured a river god in this collection. The poems are full to the brim with stunning imagery and they move around the reader like a river around a stone… The heart of this collection is in the intimate knowledge of landscape and the waterways running through it.’ Wendy Pratt, Spelt Magazine