Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist whose work has appeared widely in publications including the London Review of Books, LitHub, and The Atlantic.
She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed debut poetry book, QUIET, won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. 
QUIET is published by Faber & Faber in the UK and in North America by Knopf, Penguin Random House. 

We are delighted to be presenting John Glenday at our FRP Zoom event.

John Glenday is the author of four collections. ‘The Apple Ghost’ (Peterloo Poets 1989) won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award; ‘Undark’ (Peterloo Poets 1995) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and ‘Grain’ (Picador 2010) was shortlisted for both the Ted Hughes Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent collection, ‘The Golden Mean’ (Picador 2015) was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year and won the 2016 Roehampton Poetry Prize. His Selected Poems was published by Picador in 2020. He is the author of two pamphlets ‘mira’ (coast to coast to coast 2019 with Maria Isakova Bennett) and ‘The Firth’ (Mariscat Press 2020).

We are delighted to be presenting Nicole at our FRP Zoom event.

Nicole Durman is a prize-winning poet and nurse living in Somerset, having moved from the USA in 2011. Nicole is a member of the Fire River Poetry group and has previously been published in Balancing on a Bootheel: New Voices in Poetry from Southeast Missouri, and in Lines in the Sand: an anthology of poetry and flash fiction, caught between the tides and terra firma. Her debut collection, Ghosts of Nightshifts Past, is the result of a career spanning both A&E and hospice nursing. 

Ghosts of Nightshifts Past will allow readers to journey from a frenetic resus bay in A&E to the hushed corridors of a hospice, through the eyes of a nurse and poet. With both humour and humility, the author tells the stories of patients and staff alike, a rare window behind closed doors and curtains. 

Graeme Ryan was born in St. Anne’s on Sea in Lancashire. He taught drama for many years and is the author of several full-length plays for young people, including Heartland, The Name of the Beast, Hope Street and Tracks of the Free. He joined Fire River Poets in 2016 and often MC’s their live events. His first poetry collection Valley of the Kings was published in 2022.

This collaboration, The Dreaming of Hinkley Point, arose from encountering Georgina’s art in an exhibition and seeing the instant connection between her work and a half-completed sequence of poems exploring the ecology and spiritual landscape around Bridgwater Bay, the Quantocks and Hinkley Point. Coleridge used to walk here with Dorothy and William Wordsworth; it is where Lyrical Ballads originated in 1798. The sequence re-imagines him in a 21^st Century setting and the book is a conversation between Georgina’s work and the full poem sequence that grew from it. The reading will feature a wide range of Georgina’s paintings as well as Graeme’s poems.

The Dreaming of Hinkley Point is a riveting work of imagination, with the ingenious device of spinning Samuel Coleridge through time in a Somerset landscape familiar to him. As much a detailed visceral song to the natural world, this sequence of poems and paintings is also a poignant exploration of the wonder, awe and dangerous enchantment of technology and its promise of unlimited possibility. The engaging reach of Graeme Ryan’s craft – his assured play with form, register, tone and camera angle – is complemented and intensified by the fluidly-breathing and stunning colour images from artist Georgina King. A visually gorgeous and thought-provoking book.  KATIE GRIFFITHS

 Graeme Ryan and Georgina King’s epic art-poem The Dreaming of Hinkley Point is clever and memorable, witty and devastating. Its imagination is dazzling. The book is a happening, and every time you revisit it, another door of the imagination opens. Then like a hit of laudanum – you want more.’ MICHELLE DIAZ

GEORGINA KING

Georgina is an award winning artist living in West Somerset. Her art practice is rooted in a deep love for the Somerset Jurassic coastline, a connection that began during childhood holidays, deepened through the completion of her MA project exploring the divided landscape of Hinkley Point and culminated in her moving from London four years ago to become a permanent resident.

Her work explores transitional, often eerie landscapes, in which she immerse herself in an embodied experience of place as it unfolds, through walking, painting, and drawing directly in the environment. Her practice is informed by the natural pigments she collects and the dynamic, human and non-human processes shaping the landscape. She experiments with finding visual equivalents for these processes, resulting in raw, direct responses to the land. This practice has become a healing ritual that raises the potential for re-enchantment and asks whether we can rediscover the sense of sacred in nature and ourselves.

Georgina has exhibited widely and sells her work internationally. Last year she was selected for the prestigious international Wells Open Exhibition and she has been awarded prizes for abstract and landscape painting. Georgina has run wild pigment workshops for the Exmoor Society and her work has featured in their publication. Recently, she participated in the Words in Watchet Festival, creating an art film to accompany poetry specific to Hinkley Point and the Quantock Hills, from where the book The Dreaming of Hinkley Point arose. This year, she is presenting her first solo exhibition, The Sacred Acre, at ACEArts gallery in Somerton.

Clare Shaw (they/them) has four poetry collections with Bloodaxe. Their latest collection Towards a General Theory of Love (2022) won a Northern Writer’s Award and was a Poetry Society Book of the Year 2022. With a background in mental health and education, Clare is a keen advocate for creative writing as a tool of social and personal change. Their writing often engages with the intersections of ecology, resilience and social justice, and they work with organisations across the UK – from workplaces, schools and community groups to literary organisations like Wordsworth Grasmere, the Royal Literary Fund and the Arvon Foundation. 

We are absolutely thrilled to welcome David Harsent as our guest poet this month. David has published thirteen volumes of poetry. Legion won the Forward Prize for best collection. Night was triple short-listed in the UK and won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Fire Songs won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A Broken Man in Flower, Harsent’s versions of poems written by Yannis Ritsos while in prison camps and under house arrest, was published by Bloodaxe in 2023. He has also made English versions of C.P. Cavafy and Goran Simic. A new collection. Skin, came from Faber in March 2024.

An architect of sound, Harsent has built a haunting body of work unlike that of any other poet of our time. Formally edgy and musically hypnotic, his poetry over five decades – often cast in intricate narrative sequences – unearths our most intimate desires for people and places, combining a photographic memory with the taste of dream and improvisation. Skin, his 13th collection, contains 10 memorable sequences about silence, our proximity to the dead, and the deep-seated struggle between light and darkness. Harsent’s restlessly inventive poetic forms bear “a fugitive geometry” that houses the enigma of the “seen-unseen, / self-unself, gone into a hare and gone to ground”. The book’s sheer metaphysical reach recalls Shakespeare’s dialectical sonnets, Wallace Stevens’s philosophical soliloquies, and Beckett’s ghostly investigations of love, pain, and silence. “The skylight empty of sky”, Harsent observes, “A line of song etched into the bone.”

David Harsent has collaborated with several composers, though most often with Harrison Birtwistle. Birtwistle/Harsent collaborations have been performed at major venues worldwide, including the Royal Opera House, the Salzburg Festival, the Concertgebouw and Carnegie Hall.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor Emeritus at the University of Roehampton.

As a special extra to the event, there will be a short reading at 7.15pm by Fire River Poet Phil Kirby from his newly published Mariscat Sampler

Martin Figura’s collection and show Whistle were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show.  Shed (Gatehouse Press) and Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine (Cinnamon Press) were both published in 2016.  In 2021 he was Salisbury NHS Writer in Residence; the resulting pamphlet My Name is Mercy (Fair Acre Press) won a national NHS award. A second pamphlet from Fair Acre Press Sixteen Sonnets for Care came out in October 2022. His latest collection The Remaining Men  has just been published by Cinnamon Press. 

 The Remaining Men is a bold, ambitious collection, a Condition of England book, written from the inside and from below the salt. Personal tragedy and loss are part of the larger state of things, while the State as we have understood it since 1945 is collapsing under the weight of the indifference and hostility of those who govern. Figura’s response to these conditions is to keep his attention fixed on the telling detail, the sign of life, the endurance of ‘ordinary’ people. Sentimentality would ruin such a book, but Figura seems to have none of it, and the poems’ richness of feeling emerges from fidelity to craft – to phrasemaking, to comic timing, and to a sense of dramatic life.   Sean O’Brien

Precise and powerful, these are portraits of ordinary and extraordinary lives, interwoven with the poet’s own remarkable story. They form a collection of great intellectual rigour, skill and emotional force – but written with such tenderness, such a light touch, that you are willing to follow him into the most challenging territory. A good thing, because this book will deepen your understanding of the messy business of being alive.  Clare Shaw

Martin Figura’s poems are humane, clear-eyed, and compassionate without the least sentimentality. He has written directly out of people’s lives, particularly in hospitals, in the army and in the workplace. He is the laureate of the ordinary and overlooked. For all those reasons The Remaining Men is a very powerful collection that deserves to be read widely.  George Szirtes

We are delighted to be presenting Annie Fisher at our March FRP Zoom event.

Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as a literacy consultant working across Somerset schools. Now retired, she writes poetry for both adults and children. She has had two pamphlets published by HappenStance Press: Infinite in all Perfections (2016) and The Deal (2020). She is a member of Taunton’s Fire River Poets, and a regular contributor to the online poetry journal, The Friday Poem.

Missing the Man Next Door: The enigmatic ‘man next door’ is a recurring presence in these poems which deal with loss of various sorts. There is an acknowledgement that ‘the living always have unfinished business with the dead’ and that humour is vital as a means of personal survival.

Mariscat Press: ‘Missing the Man Next Door’ is published by Mariscat Press, ‘the jewel in the Scottish poetry crown’ (Ian McMillan). Mariscat has twice won the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award (2023 & 2015). The press is known for its tastefully designed publications and its quality backlist which includes Douglas Dunn, Diana Hendry, Jackie Kay, Michael Longley and Edwin Morgan.

Alasdair’s most recent Shearsman collections are My My My Life (2021) and Words of Mercury (2024). Born in Edinburgh, he began writing in Liverpool in the 1970’s and was given an Eric Gregory Award by the Society Of Authors in 1975. Later he took a 20 year sabbatical from poetry before stating to write again after a career in academic libraries. For 15 years he organised and presented the reading series Uncut Poets in Exeter, where he now lives.

John Richardson has been writing poetry for over 58 years. Trained as a mathematician, he spent 40 years (when not writing poetry) in various national and international IT management roles whilst also training to become psychotherapist and teaching assistant. 
He has given numerous poetry workshops, readings at Bath, Marlbrough, Swindon and Cheltenham Literature Festivals; was a founder member of Swindon’s BlueGate poets, FTLOP (for the love of poetry) and the Brokenbrough poetry group. During Covid he setup the Round-Robins, a monthly poetry email critique community. 
In 2011-12 he published the free, quarterly, online ekphrastic poetry, IMPpress e-zine. He has published several pamphlets of his own and other poets’ work. His most recent work, from which he’ll be reading, is crossing over about ghosts andincludes QR links to his recordings.

Sarah Barr lives in Dorset, writes poetry and fiction, is a Poetry Society Stanza rep, leads writing groups and mentors writers. She taught creative writing and social sciences for the Open University and worked as a counsellor. She often writes about relationships and the environment. She was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2023. Among prizes won for her poems are 1^st in the Frogmore and National Memory Day competitions, 2^nd in Poetry on the Lake and shortlisted in various others including the Bridport Prize.  Her poetry appears in many magazines and anthologies. She has published 2 poetry pamphlets: ‘January’ (2020, Maytree Press) and ‘Hawthorn’ (2024, Hedgehog Press) and a collection of short fiction, ‘Night Zoo’ (2022, Valley Press).

Dave Wakely has worked as a musician, university administrator, librarian, learning materials author and editor in cities across Europe. His writing has been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize and for the Cambridge and Bath Short Story awards, and his stories and poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Online Programme Manager for Milton Keynes Literary Festival, he lives in Buckinghamshire with his husband.

Isabella Mead’s debut pamphlet Dear Rwanda was published in 2023 with Live Canon. She has won 9 poetry competitions including the Wells (2019), Bedford (2020), the Julian Lennon Poetry Prize (2021), Ver (2022), Telegraph (2022) and Prole Laureate (2022). She has been twice Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize,  longlisted for the National Poetry Competition and was a 2021 Brotherton finalist. Her poetry has appeared in Mslexia, Magma, The Telegraph, Ink Sweat & Tears and Anacapa Review. She is Artistic Director & Joint CEO of the Poetry School, and a Trustee of Jane Austen House. In April 2024 she was Poet in Residence at Spitzbergen Arts Centre in Svalbard.