Poetry readings by English Literature staff and students

Taking place tomorrow – Wednesday 23 October – in the Oastler Building, room OA6/08, starting at 5.45pm and concluding about 7pm.  Wine and nibbles will be provided.

THE Centre for International Contemporary Poetry at the University is delighted to present an early evening of poetry readings by staff and students from the department of English Literature.

The newly-formed centre promotes research related to contemporary poetry from post-WWII to the present day.  Its members comprise a team of renowned academics and creative writers whose work engages with contemporary poetry, which has “impacted contemporary English-language poetry, in a global, transdisciplinary and transtemporal context”.

The evening will be hosted by Creative Writing Lecturer and Director of the Ted Hughes Network Dr Steve Ely, who will read a selection from his own work. 

Last year, under the title Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God (The High Window), he published his latest collection, which received much praise for its radical stance on emotive subjects and for the “exuberance of his language”.

He will be joined on the platform by Creative Writing Course Leader Dr Michael Stewart who will read from his soon to be republished collection Couples (Valley Press).  

Couples was originally published on Valentine’s Day 2013, but seven years on he has returned to it, reworking some of the existing poems and adding a few more.  The “blackly comic sequence of poems” ponders the nature of co-dependency – two people who want to be together, but at the same time cannot help but push each other away – and, true to the original, is published on Valentine’s Day 2020.

The collection developed prior and during the pregnancy and birth of Kayleigh’s first child, her daughter Eliza, who is now 18 months old.

Promoted by Maytree as “a journey of a young woman into parenthood”, the poems reflect Kayleigh’s challenges throughout this period of her life and the collection is both upsetting and uplifting, but always sincere. 

Though initially she never set out to write about parenthood or to produce a series of poems – 27 in total – that would culminate in a collective set, the whole period was such a major change in her life that she felt the need to express her feelings and thoughts.

Keepsake opens with the birth of Eliza, though the poems soon take the reader back to a former relationship and the pressures that resulted from its breakdown.

On the wider level, Kayleigh’s poems, whilst examining parenthood in terms of a whole journey, skilfully allow the reader to interpret the timeframe.

Each poem exposes Kayleigh’s fluctuating vulnerability, elation and despair and Keepsake has been well received: “In simple terms, the ‘journey’ is from a bad place to a good place and I’ve had a good response,” said Kayleigh.  “A lot of people felt that they could relate to it, especially parents.”

Though not directly part of the work towards her PhD, which itself delves into the full spectrum of the female identity, Keepsake will add to Kayleigh’s career portfolio as well as her reputation as a new poet with something to say.