A poetry collection which has at its heart poems inspired by the testimonies of Japan’s dwindling band of atomic bomb survivors is being launched in Coventry. Antony Owen was born in blitz-hit Coventry, and went to Hiroshima in 2015.

Owen describes himself as a peace poet, and is a CND peace education patron. He said: “The survivors in Hiroshima I heard testimonies from are becoming fewer and fewer and many are afraid of the hostile political climate in the world.”

The Nagasaki Elder, published by V.Press, also includes poems about Owen’s home city, which suffered badly in the second world war. One poem in the collection is titled ‘Koventrieren’, which the poet explains is a word introduced into the German language after the Coventry raids. It means “to completely destroy a city from the air”. There are other poems about Dresden, Basra, and Chernobyl.

The book launch is free and is at Coventry’s Inspire Bar, which is at the base of a church spire, on Thursday 7 September at 7.30pm. More details and Map