Silver Street Poets

3rd January 2020, 12:00pm - 1:30pm, Hours Space, Colston Yard, off Colston Street, Bristol BS1 5BD

Thank you, Deb Harvey, for this opportunity to read from my new pamphlet in Bristol. Instead, Let Us Say, (Dempsey & Windle, 2019), looks with empathy and fortitude at everything from the plight of the natural world to personal loss, and offers a message of hope for dark times.

Praise for Instead, Let Us Say:
"Down to earth, tender and compassionate, these are resilient poems 'loud with life', grounded in working-class roots, with a delicious alertness to sensual detail. Equally remarkable is their unabashed metaphysics, celebrating the hidden realities of love and unity of all life. On Hearing Alice Oswald Read Memorial is sheer genius."
Rosie Jackson

"This is a sensual, tender-hearted poetry, aglow with its own humanity. There is, throughout, an intensely felt oneness with the natural world, rendered by a true poet in possession of impressive technical gifts. A very fine collection that rewards our attention."
Martin Malone

"This pamphlet - Dawn Gorman's third - is a treasure-trove of moments caught in passing and held up to the light of the poet's imagination. Her work shows us how the central paradox of poetry is accomplished: how words can preserve fleeting impressions, stay the ephemeral, capture the intangible: 'Time's mouth is hungry, wide, / and one thing pulls in the next'. There is emotional depth here too; at the heart of the book is a group of poems tracing the arc of a love affair in images that are rooted in particular times and places yet reach out beyond the purely personal. That sense of connectedness with other lives is vividly enacted in other poems like Clout and Maiden Stakes where the poet evokes raw and brutal incidents with tender eloquence."
Lesley Saunders