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John Harvey and Rob Etty, a Shoestring Press poetry reading, together with Andrew Sant

John Harvey and Rob Etty, a Shoestring Press poetry reading, together with Andrew  Sant
Wednesday, 9th April, 2025    
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
*Five Leaves Bookshop
14a Long Row, Nottingham, NG12DH
Bookings closed

Now living in London, John Harvey has long had strong associations with Nottingham, as student, teacher and writer. An Honorary Fellow of Goldsmiths College, University of London, he is the recipient of Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Hertfordshire and Nottingham, and in 2007 was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in crime writing.
John is an Honorary Life Member of the Notts County F.C. Official Supporters’ Association.

“Listen to Chet Baker on trumpet doing ‘Almost Blue’ or ‘My Funny Valentine”, then re-read Harvey. You will hear Harvey’s style, one that I call ‘enfolding’: sadness without bitterness, reminiscence without nostalgia, solace without irony – feelings more poignant than those lost moments themselves when they were lived. If you don’t leave someone, that someone will leave you. Harvey shares O’Hara’s seemingly careless brilliance: an art that is seamless, disguising the craft.”                                                                                                                                                                               – Norbert Hirschhorn: London Grip

“John Harvey’s poetry is spacious, unhurried, measured, taking its time to unfurl its effect but keeping its hooks in the reader by careful control of pace and by making every word count.” – Robin Thomas: The High Window

London Grip on Rob Etty’s Beyond the Last House

I never look at the last page first, but this book seems primed to fall open on p.94 and it can’t be avoided. At 11 lines it is the shortest poem in the book:

It will end in the way a novel ends.
Not in completeness, as some novels do,
with success, an epiphany, thawing snow,
a locked front door and a ring twisted off,
or the words of a longed-for message,

but like a reader turning the page
and finding flyleaves, and then turning
back to read again the paragraph
that seems to be unaware of being the last,
and tells of a car in a lay-by near fields

on a road to a waking town.
                                                  (“Spoiler Alert”)

The poem immediately preceding this one acknowledges a debt to Robert Frost, but perhaps it is here that we most feel the similarity. Coming as it does at the end of a section pre-occupied with aging and technology (a lot of us have been there) it is a most haunting, ambivalent ending – and it is also a spoiler for what’s about to be discovered if we read the book front-to-back. Robert Etty often creates an effect similar to the well-meaning cop at a road-block (‘There’s nothing to see here’) before delving into the nothing in search of what he calls ‘the silence inside the noise’. His poems are loaded with immense charm and persuasiveness and sometimes risk springing a super-charged stripped-down ‘nothing’ upon us when we least expect it. As a result, his various takes on ‘nothing’ are unusually entertaining even when we know what’s coming.

Andrew Sant was born in London and educated there and in Melbourne after his family emigrated to Australia. He has subsequently lived in London at various times. In 2001 he was resident in Beijing, China. Among the countries where he has been invited to read his work are Italy, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Malta and New Zealand. He just happens to be in Nottingham tonight!

He jointly founded the Tasmanian-based literary quarterly, Island, where by that time he had moved, and served as an editor for ten years. He is a former member of both the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board. Parallel occupations have included teaching and copywriting. He will be reading from his new collection Natural Wonders.

 

Refreshments included, as is a free gift of a book (not the books the poets are reading from!)

Bookings

Bookings are closed for this event.