The first in a series of four Adventures in Poetry events during 2025, with four Nottingham-based poets reading with a specially invited guest of their own choosing. The poets will read, chat, and answer questions from the audience. The series kicks off here, with Alan Baker and his guest Carrie Etter.

Carrie Etter’s Grief’s Alphabet is an elegy for the poet’s mother, opening a pathway through grief in spite of the impossible task of expressing such a loss.
Chronologically and alphabetically, the collection moves from early life with the narrator’s adoption, through to the mother’s unexpected death and the banal yet painful tasks which follow, such as sorting clothes and arranging the funeral. The final section deals with life after loss, and the long work of grieving which culminates in the title poem.
Evoking the complex, intimate relationship between mother and daughter, this raw yet deft collection celebrates love in the same breath as it weeps for its loss.

American expatriate Carrie Etter has published four collections of poetry, including The Tethers (Seren) winner of the London New Poetry Prize, and Imagined Sons (Seren), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. She also edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman), a TLS Book of the Year. Individual poems have appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. She also writes short stories, essays, and reviews, and has received grants from Arts Council England and The Society of Authors.

Alan Baker was born and raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and has lived in Nottingham since 1985. He runs the poetry publisher Leafe Press and its associated magazine, Litter. His recent collections include Riverrun,, a book of modernist sonnets about the River Trent in its Nottinghamshire stretch, Tyneside dialect poetry and A Book of Odes dealing with migration and the social and political histories of the north and midlands.

Tickets are £4.50, £3.00 to students but free to members of Nottingham Poetry Society

Refreshments included

Adventures in Poetry is grateful for the financial support of the Nottingham Poetry Society

adventuresinpoetry.blogspot.com