Doors open at 6.30pm, with light refreshments served. Reading will start at 7pm and end at 8pm.
Poetry Playback is a new reading series in which a poet is invited to read from an exemplary new work in its entirety, from start to finish, as a single, sustained performance.
One of the most discussed poetry books of 2019, Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost is a dark and unsettling breakthrough collection, bringing together poems of the natural world, depression, the body, migration and child/parenthood. Encircling provocatively around its remarkable and shocking central sequence of ‘Zeus’ poems, it is a mind-bending retelling of Greek mythology that examines post-traumatic change and the physical effects of sexual violence on its victims.
Fiona Benson (b. 1978, Wroughton, Wiltshire) began keeping a special notebook for poetry, as distinct from song lyrics, at the age of 17. A Faber New Poet, her first collection, Bright Travellers (Cape), won the Seamus Heaney Prize. Her second collection, Vertigo & Ghost (Cape), was published earlier this year.
Poetry Playbacks are co-produced with Poetry School. Founded in 1997, Poetry School is a national arts organisation providing inspiring tuition and opportunities for poets and poetry audiences.