Description:

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Father's Father's Father by Dane Holt. The reading will be hosted by Caroline Bird. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing.

Dane Holt's subject is often the aftermath of tragedy - ecological, personal or social - but these poems grieve in surprising ways. Deflection, displacement and refracted voices combine to animate a world of brilliantly realised situations. And Holt's characters, though always articulate, do not precisely comprehend their own relation to what they inherit. Compelling, funny, endlessly inventive, this bold debut collection explores the formation and disillusion of masculinity and community, exposing just how tender and brittle these constructs are.

'In Dane Holt's Father's Father's Father there are delicate parables, surreal narrations, moving and direct lyrics, and cameos from unexpected quarters (Tammy Wynette? John Cena?), but wherever the poems go, the tone is convincing, the line controlled, and a lovely obliquity pushes against the emotional pressure. It's a wonderfully inventive and auspicious debut.' - Nick Laird

About the speakers:

Dane Holt holds a PhD from Queen's University Belfast. His debut pamphlet, Many Professional Wrestlers Never Retire (Lifeboat Press), was published in 2023 and was a Poetry Book Society Autumn Pamphlet Choice. In 2019, he won the inaugural Brotherton Prize, awarded by the University of Leeds. He was the 2023 Ciaran Carson Publishing Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Belfast. 

Caroline Bird has seven previous volumes published by Carcanet. Her sixth collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. A two-time winner of the Foyles Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was 15. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics.  In 2023, she won a Cholmondeley Award. Her Selected Poems, Rookie, was published in 2022.