Guest Poet: Moira Andrew
Moira Andrew was born and educated in Scotland. She is an ex-primary teacher, head teacher and college lecturer in primary education (known there as the 'poetry lady'!), and part-time tutor in Creative Writing in the University of Glamorgan. She wrote several books on the creative arts for primary teachers from Belair in the late '90s & early 2000s, the best-known perhaps, Language in Colour and Paint a Poem. She has also written lots of children's poetry for various publishers, poetry posters and stories for Scholastic. She now concentrates mainly on poetry for adults, with eight collections in publication, the first, Light the Blue Touch Paper, Iron Press, 1986 & 1989, the most recent Breakfast with Swallows, Austin Macaulay, 2018 and Geese and Daughters, Indigo Dreams, 2019; the others, Firebird and Man in the Moon, are from IDP. She also has a children's collection, Wish a Wish, from Poetry Space, 2012, and is editor of a number of anthologies, the most recent, A Scream of Many Colours, published this year by Poetry Space. Moira currently runs a monthly poetry workshop for adults in Nunney. Hand-in-Hand, the group's first pamphlet, was published by Poetry Space this year.
Photo: David Golby.
Guest Poet: Neil Richards
Neil Richards is from Worcester and has been writing for four years. He has a pamphlet out with Frosted Fire Press and has had poems published in Ink Sweat and Tears, Strix and Snakeskin. He has performed at Wychwood Festival, Cheltenham Festival and most recently with Candlestick Press.
Guest Poet: Tom Sastry
Tom Sastry was chosen by Carol Ann Duffy as one of the 2016 Laureate's Choice poets. His resulting pamphlet, Complicity, was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice and a Poetry School Book of the Year. His first full collection A Man's House Catches Fire will be published by Nine Arches Press in October 2019.
19th December 2019, The Swan Hotel, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire BA15 1LN
Thank you, lovely poets, for coming along to Words & Ears last night at such a busy - and rain-sodden - time! It was a huge pleasure to welcome our three guest poets - Moira Andrew, Neil Richards and Tom Sastry. Moira, wonderfully assisted by (and with musical accompaniment from) Norman Leater, took us from failing eyesight, right back to her first, hilariously memorable kiss, dodging dragons along the way. Neil swept us away to a world of cellos and nightingales, where 'sometimes your sadness is a violin', and 'the Seine is a prayer unscrolling'. And Tom, with gorgeously funny links between poems that spilled over and over with open-hearted wisdom, advised: 'do not listen to the sea', and reminded us how we all like to have a 'pet inferno' (don't we?!)... Thank you to them, and to our great open mic-ers, Stephen Payne, Peter O'Grady, John Powell, Verona Bass, Mike Grenville, Paul Brokensha and Ann Phillips.
