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:

Xavier Panadès has produced a striking bilingual collection of poetry that explores the world of Catalan exile, where the themes of the environment and belonging mix with intensely personal experiences and wider political reflections.

Catalan born Xavier Panadès I Blas was brought up in a peasant family and educated to the revolutionary values of solidarity, justice, and freedom. This led to Xavier to have been involved in social-political and environmental movements since the mid-1980s.

Xavier has been instrumental in the internationalisation the culture of the Catalan Lands. He has been stunning audiences for the last 20 years with his explosive performances in Catalan around the globe.

He is known for his passionate performances of poetry and stories.He is the author of the book of poetry in The Ear of Eternity (Francis Boutle: 2019), and his work is regularly published in international journals.  Xavier is also a great interpreter of poetry in Catalan, Castilian, and English and his live interpretations are often backed with music.

Kelvin Corcoran lives in Brussels.  He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including New and Selected Poems, For The Greek Spring from Shearsman, and most recently Facing West, 2017, the Medicine Unboxed sponsored Not Much To Say Really, 2017, Article 50, 2018, Below This Level, 2019 and The Republic of Song, Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, (America) 2020, and Orpheus Asymmetric, 2020.  2023 will see the publication of his Collected Poems and Transparent Blue of Everything, a collaboration with the artist David Rees.

The sequence ‘Helen Mania’ was a Poetry Book Society choice and the poem ‘At the Hospital Doors’ was highly commended by the Forward Prize jury 2017.  His work is the subject of a study edited byAndy Brown, The Writing Occurs as Song, 2013 and is discussed in The Return of Pytheas: Scenes from British and Greek Poetry in Dialogue, Paschalis Nikolaou, 2017.  Kelvin Corcoran has also edited an account of the poetry of Lee Harwood in Not the Full Story: Six Interviews with Lee Harwood, 2008.  He’s the co-editor with Robert Sheppard of The New Collected Poems of Lee Harwood.

Jonathan Richards is a former general practitioner and Health Board Clinical Director. He has been writing poems for twenty five years. He participated in the Masters in Writing course at the University of South Wales in 2015-2017.

He was commended by the Hippocrates Poetry Competition in 2019 for his poem ‘Rapids’.

His poems have appeared in anthologies including Red Poets, These Are The Hands, The Saccharin Poetry collection Vol 1 and Onward/Ymlaen.

His first collection was River Days, a collaboration with an artist Ruth End. Published in 2019.  His second, published in June 2022, is Fall, Falling, Fallen.