Please join us on the 23rd of January at Heffers in Cambridge, where
Rebecca Watts and
Peter McDonald will be discussing their new collections:
The Face in the Well and
One Little Room.
The Face in the Well is Rebecca Watts' third collection of poetry and is a vibrant, resonant exploration of childhood, desire, conflict and the animal nature of the self. A 21st-century feminist deconstruction of the male poetic canon, where poems that offer a challenge to Yeats, Hughes, Heaney and O'Hara are interwoven with homages to Emily Brontë, Plath and other female role models.
One Little Room is Peter McDonald's eighth poetry collection and effects transformations of memory and history, love and loss. These poems inhabit the surroundings of a Belfast childhood and the sequence 'Centenary' (100 years of public and private history) represents an important new contribution to the poetic understanding of Northern Ireland.
Rebecca and Peter will be hosted by their fellow Carcanet poet,
Adam Crothers.
Tickets are £5, and include refreshments - they are available
here.
Rebecca Watts was born in Suffolk in 1983 and currently lives in Cambridge, where she works as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and freelance writer, editor and tutor. A selection of her poetry was included in
New Poetries VI (2015). Her debut collection
The Met Office Advises Caution (2016) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Her second collection,
Red Gloves, was published in 2020 and won a Gladstone's Library Writers-in-Residence Award.
Peter McDonald was born in Belfast in 1962. His first book of poetry,
Biting the Wax, was published in 1989, and since then seven volumes of his verse have appeared, including his
Collected Poems (2012). He has written four books of literary criticism, including
Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1997) and
Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012), and has edited Louis MacNeice's
Collected Poems (2007) and most recently three volumes of the Longman Poems of W.B. Yeats. He is Emeritus Professor of British and Irish Poetry in Oxford University, and an Emeritus Student of Christ Church, Oxford.
