Established Monthly Poetry Session in the Melville bar, hosted by Ric Hool.  Bringing local and international poets to Abergavenny to celebrate the art of words and the story of our time that is expressed by current poets.  £5

This Months Guest Poets:

Peter Hughes lives on the northern margins of Snowdonia where he runs Oystercatcher Press. He also teaches, and has been Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. Shearsman published Peter’s Selected Poems alongside a volume entitled ‘An intuition of the particular’: some essays on the poetry of Peter Hughes. His other poetry publications include innovative versions of Petrarch, Cavalcanti and Leopardi. His most recent books are A Berlin Entrainment (Shearsman), and Arrangements (Aquifer), a collaboration with Eléna Rivera.

Lesley Burt lives in Christchurch, Dorset. Her poetry has been published in magazines such as Tears in the Fence, Prole, Sentinel Literary Quarterly and Dreich, and online, including by The Poetry Shed, The High Window, The Blue Nib and Ink, Sweat and Tears. She is a long-standing member of the Tears in the Fence Workshop and Festival groups.

Her first pamphlet, Mr & Mrs Andrews Reframed, is published by Templar Poetry in their Iota Shots Series. It was a winner in the 2022 iOTA Shot Pamphlet Awards.

Philip Rush lives in Stroud where he runs a small poetry press. Yew Tree Press of Stroud prepares and publishes pamphlets by local and not-so-local poets which accompanies readings in the town, usually at the Museum in the Park. His own poems have been in many British and Irish magazines and in anthologies from Carcanet, Bloodaxe and Seren. Philip thinks that poems help us to see the world in new ways and that the best poems help us to see ‘into the life of things’. The means at any poem’s disposal to achieve this end are almost infinitely broad.