Dawn Gorman believes poetry should be everywhere - puts it on beermats,
uses it to
work with people with memory loss, facilitates writing workshops,
organises poetry
events and runs international poetry competitions. She is
widely published, and has
performed in New York, Paris, London - and lots of
smaller places in between.
“Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket;
you put
your life into it and make something out of that.”
Mary Oliver
Ben Banyard
Guest Poet: Ben Banyard
Ben Banyard is delighted to be popping over from his home in Portishead, near Bristol, to share poems from his latest collection, We Are All Lucky (Indigo Dreams, 2018) and debut pamphlet, Communing (Indigo Dreams, 2016). He grew up in Solihull but has lived in the West Country since the mid-90s. Ben's poems have appeared in Under the Radar, The Intepreter's House, Acumen, Prole, And Other Poems, Proletarian Poetry, Popshot, Atrium, The Lake, Firth, Marble and many others. Ben is currently finalising his as-yet-untitled second full collection.
Carrie Etter
Guest Poet: Carrie Etter
Carrie Etter's fourth collection, The Weather in Normal (US: Station Hill; UK: Seren), explores the losses of home through parents' deaths, the sale of the family house, and the effects of climate change. As Philip Gross remarks, "One of the particular gifts of poetry is here in force: the power of a few words to create great spaces. The spaces of a prairie landscape round a small town or between present and past, between people in a family or between words on the page, these are not emptiness but tingling with resonance, with the poems' fine attention. Touched and unsettled, we slip seamlessly between the intimate detail of loss and the vast perspective in which even the prairies are dwarfed by the scale of climate change." Carrie is a Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and also regularly teaches for Poetry Swindon and The Poetry School.
© Dawn Gorman 2015
