Jacob Polley Poetry Reading
7.30pm, Tuesday 11th August 2026 at Cakes and Ale cafe, Carlisle
£7.00
Over the two decades since his award-winning debut, The Brink, Jacob Polley has earned a reputation as one of the major poetic talents to come out of the north of England. Rooted in the folkloric inheritance of Reiver country – in its rhymes and spells, its work and weather – his poems conduct the electricity of the English lyric tradition into modern vessels and remastered forms. Metamorphosis is central to his perception: with the lightest touch, sunlight becomes honey, children become owls, and loss is alchemised into objects and animals, love songs and cradle songs.
“I’ve tried to enact a kind of intense alertness in my poems,” he writes, “to what it’s like to be alive and conscious and a person that the world pours into through the ears, eyes and heart”. An ideal entry point for new readers, Jacob Polley’s Selected Poems affirms his standing as one of the most gifted poets of his generation.
Jacob Polley was born in Carlisle, Cumbria and is the author of 5 acclaimed books of poetry, The Brink (2003), Little Gods (2006) The Havocs (2012), Jackself (2016) and Material Properties (2023) and one novel, Talk of the Town (2009). His fourth book of poems, Jackself (2016), won the T.S. Eliot Prize ans his novel Talk of the Town won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2010. In 2011, he was Arts Queensland’s poet-in-residence, and he was Visiting Fellow Commoner in the Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, 2005-7. He has also held residencies at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and at the Wordsworth Trust. He teaches at Newcastle University and lives with his family on the north-east coast.
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