Rory Waterman will read from this collection of memoir, poetry and criticism by W.H. Davies, which Rory has supplemented with comprehensive editorial notes.

W.H. Davies (1871-1940) was popularly known as the ‘tramp-poet’. Now known almost exclusively for a handful of poems and his memoir The Autobiography of a Supertramp, this collection brings back into print the work of a remarkable and controversial writer.

Greg Woods reads from his latest collection Art in Heaven, which is described as a sequence of pared-down sonnets in unrhymed iambic trimeter. The ordinary lives of the people in them are conveyed in spare detail. Most are stricken by desire or regret, some by indifference. Memory haunts or comforts them. Woods handles them all with the same dispassionate intensity.

John Lucas will be reading from his latest collection, Portable Property,  which crackles with wit and insight, creating and recreating worlds at once familiar and original. Lucas brings to his work an acute observational skill allied to a compassion for all-too-human weaknesses.

With an ear for the colloquial, Lucas draws from the telling minutiae of the everyday, tackling head on the great themes and, in the process, producing poetry recognisably of the English lyric tradition: unfussily modest, comprehensible and engaging the reader in a real place and time.