Because of complications caused by the rail strike, tonight’s ORBIS event has been replaced by readings from Andrew Taylor (who had been on the ORBIS line up) and Martin Stannard

Andrew Taylor will largely be reading from Northangerland

In Northangerland Andrew Taylor has taken the black sheep of the Brontë family and pushed him centre-stage, repurposing Branwell’s pseudonym as a title. ‘Re-versioning’, as Taylor dubs his process, is not so much offering a parallel text or a commentary on the original, but effects a distillation of it, isolating its essence, updating. He resembles Basil Bunting deleting and scribbling his way through Shakespeare’s sonnets, as he exchanges Brontë’s rhetoric for sculpted lines and deft sound-shapes (the rhymes chiming internally across their precise new line-breaks). Taylor is like an architect decluttering the Brontë Parsonage into a modern minimalist and open plan living space: ‘forms refuse the real/ & unreal to confuse phantom/ paths of joy’. For all its careful acknowledgement of sources, this is an assured work for our times.

Martin Stannard will largely be reading from Postcards to Ma

Martin Stannard’s latest poetic production is in his trademark witty and sardonic style. This is a single long poem in which the postcard mode is transformed through fantasy and imagination into a surreal, moving and funny meditation on contemporary culture.

Both are assured readers and both published by Leafe Press

Tickets: £3.00 including refreshments

Free to members of Nottingham Poetry Society

Click here to book on Eventbrite – note the heading on Eventbrite still refers to Orbis! That’s fine…