Launch of Geraldine Paine's poetry collection

[sheenaghpugh]

- for which, actually, you won't need the Vogon poetry appreciation chair. Geraldine Paine's first full-length collection, The Go-Away Bird (pub. Lapwing, Belfast) gets launched from 6pm-8pm on Friday December 12th at the Chris Beetles gallery, 8-10 Ryder Street, London SW1 (between Green Park and Piccadilly Circus tube stations).

There's a page on Geraldine here and some poems here. She's been all sorts of things that poets generally aren't, including an actress and a magistrate - she has a lovely sequence of "found poems" called Leaden Hearts, based on tokens left behind for their families by transported convicts, in which they sound as close to us as any modern bad (or unfortunate)lad. She also has close family ties with Zimbabwe and writes about that troubled place (which again, not many poets do, that I know of) in a way that manages to be both elegiac and life-enhancing. And about being a wartime evacuee child, and eating oysters, and a whole lot else.

Good collection, which I'll do a full review of later, and it'll be a good reading; she's been part of a performing poets' group called Scatterlings for some time.

Comments

Geraldine Paine

[peonymoon.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Sheenagh, thanks for this post and the poetry pf links. Looking forward to reading your review of The Go-Away-Bird. I particularly like A Mir astronaut opens an escape hatch and Stranger.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Oh, I did like those poems... the glove one especially.

[sheenaghpugh]

Shame it's such a long way from the antipodes to the book launch!

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I need a teleport. Or a TARDIS.