International Carcanet Poets: Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Contact: Events@theportico.org.uk

Chris Wallace-Crabbe is a leading Australian poet and essayist, with a special interest in the visual arts. He has published more than twenty collections of poetry, including Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (Carcanet) and Afternoon in the Central Nervous System (Braziller, NY). His New and Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in 2013. The son of a pianist and a journalist, he was raised ‘to be interested in everything’. He is a Professor Emeritus at Melbourne University, and has held posts at Harvard and Ca’ Foscari, Venice. He received the Dublin Prize for Arts and Sciences in 1987, the Philip Hodgins Prize for Literature in 2002, and in 2011 the Order of Australia.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s Rondo harvests a decade’s worth of new writing by one of Australia’s foremost poets. It is currently shortlisted for the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier's Literature Awards. This new collection paints a vivid portrait of eucalypt Australia’s current position in an rapidly changing world. The poet asks for fresh meanings from Gallipoli and Scotland, from physics and from ‘Art’s porous auditorium’, where poetry can still be heard. ‘The words are only the words,’ he writes, ‘which is more or less everything.’

Critic Eric Ormsby dubbed Wallace-Crabbe a ‘genial smuggler of surprises’: ‘his uncommon affability, even when treating the gravest subjects, leaves the reader unprepared for his sudden luxuriance of phrase.’ (TLS)

This event also features Marius Kociejowski and Carola Luther.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/carcanet-poets-at-the-portico-library-featuring-chris-wallace-crabbe-tickets-58101825123

Poet, essayist and travel writer, Marius Kociejowski has published three collections of poetry, two books based on his travels in Syria, The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool (Eland) and The Pigeon Wars of Damascus (Biblioasis), God's Zoo: Artists, Exiles, Londoners (Carcanet), which depicts a journey through the world cultures of contemporary London, two books of essays and feuilletons The Pebble Chance (Biblioasis) and Zoroaster's Children (Biblioasis), The Notebooks of Arcangelo Riffis (not yet published) and is currently working on a book about Naples.

Two decades ago a critic characterised Marius Kociejowski as a poet ‘whose imagination prowls the geographical boundaries of western culture’. He has a Polish name, was born in Canada, and lives in London where he collects other exiles, listens to their lives and writes them up. God’s Zoo (Carcanet, 2014), Evan Jones describes as ‘a world journey through London’s exiled and émigré artists, writers, poets and musicians’. He likes middle-length forms, less the lyric than the epylion, the epistle, dramatic monologue and eclogue. One of his tutelary spirits is the great Leopardi. Music is everywhere, notably Chopin and George Sand: music seems to propose some of the forms he chooses and how he modulates them. ‘All parts give meaning to the whole,’ he says, and proves it again and again. Kociejowski has produced over the last five decades a fine, refined body of work which this book celebrates.

Carola Luther grew up in South Africa and moved to England in 1981. Herfirst poetry collection, Walking the Animals, was published by Carcanet Press in 2004 and shortlisted that year for the Forward Prize for First Collection. Her second collection, Arguing with Malarchy, was published by Carcanet Press in 2011. Herd, a pamphlet of poems, was published in 2012 by The Wordsworth Trust where Carola was poet-in-residence. She has also written text for theatre and mixed media performance. The most recent of these was the libretto for Lilith, (composer, Dimitar Bodurov) a piece commissioned and conceived by Claron McFadden.

Arguing with Malarchy is full of voices. Tender, sinister, sad or cantankerous, they compel us to attend to their realities, the glimpsed depths of their stories, the distances they have travelled. Carola Luther’s poems are alert to the ways a life can be briefly snared in the turn of a phrase – or in the moment when language fails. She explores silences, absences, the unspoken communication between animals and human beings, the living and the dead, and the boundaries between what is remembered, forgotten or invented. In the book’s first part, a chronicle of mourning creates ‘the bare threads of tunes’ out of what is lost, and begins a new story. In the second part, Luther’s characters live in their language; ‘Keep talking,’ the old man tells Malarchy. We travel through elemental landscapes of sea and sky, shadows and wide savannahs that exist beyond language and sustain when words are silenced.

A book signing will take place after the event and drinks will be on sale.

This is one event in a double-bill during May; Carcanet and The Portico Library bring some of Carcanet's highly lauded international poets to Manchester. Book here for the partner event featuring Sheri Benning. Anyone attending both events will receive two complimentary drinks at the second event on the 16th of May. Please ensure you book under the same name each time so this can be verified.

Entry: £3.79 – £4.85

Time: 6:30pm