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:
The Annual Chris Torrance Reading
A celebration of an influential but marginalised poet whose work and extramural teaching class at Cardiff University, Adventures in Creative Writing, opened a new consciousness for many aspiring poets. Chris died 21st July 2021.
Janet Sutherland was born in Wiltshire and grew up on a dairy farm, she is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Messenger House (Shearsman Books, 2023) which is about her great great grandfather’s travels to Serbia in the 1840’s with his friend, Mr Gutch, who was a Queen’s Messenger. George Davies, her great-great-grandfather, grew up in Crickhowell. Her poems are widely anthologised and are published in magazines such as Poetry Ireland Review, New Statesman, The Spectator and The North. A critical essay on the poet Charles Reznikoff appeared as an afterword to two new editions of his work, Holocaust, in the UK (Five Leaves Publishing, 2009) and USA (Black Sparrow Press, 2007). She won the 2017 Kent and Sussex Poetry Prize and received a Hawthornden Fellowship for 2018. She has an MA in American Poetry from the University of Essex. She lives in Lewes, East Sussex.
Ian Brinton’s most recent publications include Language and Death, a translation of poems by Philippe Jaccottet (Equipage, 2022), Paul Valéry’s Selected Poems (Muscaliet Press, 2021, prefaced by Michael Heller), Paris Scenes, a translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux Parisiens’, (Two Rivers Press, 2021) and Islands of Voices, the selected poems of Douglas Oliver (Shearsman Books, 2020). His translation of de Nerval’s Les Chimères will appear from Muscaliet Press in 2023. He reviews for The London Magazine, PN Review, Litter, Long Poem Magazine and Golden Handcuffs Review; he co-edits SNOW and helps curate the Cambridge University Library Archive of Modern Poetry.
Please email melvillecentrearts@gmail.com to book your space.
