Thursday 1st Nov 7.30pm
Fleur Adcock and Kevin Ireland £4

FLEUR ADCOCK is one of our most celebrated and best loved poets. Born in Auckland, New Zealand, she moved to England in 1963. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1964, and her Collected Poems 1960-2000 was published twelve years ago. Disarmingly conversational in style, her poems are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental yet mischievous view of personal relationships. Common themes are identity and place, human relationships and everyday activities, but this mundanity is flavoured frequently with a dark twist.

KEVIN IRELAND was born in Auckland in 1933 and although based in England for 25 years from 1959, he has consistently identified himself as a New Zealand poet. He has published 18 collections of poetry and his first book of prose was released in 1995, followed by a first novel in 1996. He was awarded an OBE for services to literature, and received a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in 2004. He is commonly held to be one of New Zealand's greatest poets.

DAVID HERD is Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent. His latest collection of poetry, All Just, was published earlier this year by Carcanet, and its poems use broken phrases, idioms and expressions from various and competing contexts. He is a co-founder of the Sounds New Poetry festival and currently directs the Centre for Modern Poetry in the School of English.

SIMON SMITH was for 16 years librarian at the Poetry Library in London and is now lecturer at the University of Kent. He has published four collections of poetry. He is a founder, with David Herd, of the arts collective Zone.

David and Simon will read from their recent publications in the first-half, and will perform ROTE/THRU, a collaborative book-length poem written by David Herd and Simon Smith with music from The-Quartet, in the second-half.

Three members of THE-QUARTET will perform Rote/Thru this evening: Jack Hues (guitar), Sam Bailey (piano, keyboard) and Liran Donin (double bass). The-Quartet has established a fine reputation for dynamic, high octane performances and are based in Kent.

JOHN HEGLEY is one of this country's most famous wearer of spectacles. He wears them upon his nose. He also writes and recites poetry, cutting his teeth on the streets of Hull and London in the 1970s and 1980s and fronting the Popticians, with whom he recorded two sessions for John Peel. He has since been a frequent performer of his words, sung and spoken, on both local and national radio. He has published ten books of verse and prose pieces, two CDs and one mug. An Edinburgh Festival regular, he is noted for his exploration of such diverse topics as dog hair, potatoes, handkerchieves and the misery of human existence. A new collection, Peace, Love and Potatoes, is to be published in October.

GEORGE CHOPPING is customer focused, hard working, honest and flexible in his approach to duties. He has a full driving licence with lots of endorsements, a Welcome Host Certificate, seven GCSE's at grade C, congenital heart disease, Crohn's Disease and at times very low self esteem. He is a great performer and has a collection of verse published by Unbound recently, Smoking With Crohn's.

JOHN FULLER, born in 1937, has published 15 collections of verse, including Stones and Fires (1996), Now and for a Time (2002), Song and Dance (2008) and a recent New Selected Poems 1983-2008; he has written over 50 books. John Fuller was mentored by W.H. Auden and was influenced also by Eliot, Graves and Stevens. His poetry displays a virtuosic ease within the constraints of formal, metered verse; it is a poetry of ideas. In a 2006 interview with Lidia Vianu, he explained that "a good poem takes some irresolvable complication, worries it to death like a dog with a bone, and leaves it still unresolved. The pleasure of the poem lies entirely in the worrying, the verbal growling and play. Life itself stubbornly remains entirely like a bone." In 1968 he founded the Sycamore Press, which operated from his garage, and published many of the most important poets of the latter-half of the twentieth century, such as W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin and Peter Porter.

Members of Oxford's STANZA poetry group will read this evening also, including Derek Summers, Caroline Ashley, Hanne Busck-Nielsen, Sarianne Durie, Andrew Smardon and with Jennifer A. McGowan and Michael Swan.

Tina will be singing a selection from Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Kurt Weill and others.

TINA MAY, one of the world's leading jazz vocalists, began her apprenticeship in jazz in Paris in the early 1990s when she met up with Pascal Gaubert and Patrick Villanueva, who invited her to have a jam with them (these musicians recorded with Tina on a Live in Paris album nearly twenty years later), and very soon Tina was performing venues across Paris, in particular Le Caveau de la Huchette and Le Slow Club became regular gigs. Tina is now a regular performer at the top jazz and arts festivals as well as in broadcasts with the BBC Big Band. She has toured extensively across Europe and the Far East. She has received numerous awards including a silver medal by The Worshipful Company of Musicians.

NIKKI ILES is an outstanding pianist, composer and educator. She won the John Dankworth Special Award at the 1996 BT British Jazz Awards and performs often with Kenny Wheeler, Julian Arguelles, Tony Coe and other luminaries; she has accompanied Tina May regularly for nearly twenty years.

ANTONIO MOURA's first English publication, Silence River, brings his satirical, political and spiritual voice to English readers. He is considered to be among the most resilient of Brazilian poets writing today. He has published two previous books of original poetry in Brazil. Earlier versions of some translations in Silence River have appeared in Shearsman and Modern Poetry in Translation. This is a rare opportunity to hear this highly-regarded Brazilian poet, and promises to offer a double act of bossa poetry that has travelled 6000 miles: robust and convincing.

STEFAN TOBLER is a Brazilian Englishman, born in the Amazon, who translates from Portuguese and German. His translations appearing in 2012 include Água Viva by Clarice Lispector (for Penguin Classics UK and New Directions) and the poetry collection Silence River by Antônio Moura (Arc Publications). He reads French and Spanish too.

KEVIN CROSSLEY-HOLLAND is a poet and prize-winning writer for children, including the Seeing Stone trilogy. winner of the Guardian Children's Fiction Award, the Smarties Prize Bronze Medal, and the Tir na n-Og Award. He has translated Beowulf from the Anglo-Saxon, and his retellings of traditional tale include The Penguin Book of Norse Myths and British Folk Tales (The Magic Lands). His collaborations with composers include two operas with Nicola Lefanu, song cycles with Sir Arthur Bliss and William Mathias. Kevin has written eight collections of poetry, and his new and selected poems, The Mountains of Norfolk, was published by Enitharmon Press last autumn. His poetry is inspired often as a response to the landscape of Norfolk and Suffolk

LIZ BERRY was born in the Black Country and now lives in London. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2009. Her poems have appeared in many of the major UK magazines and on BBC Radio 3. Her debut pamphlet The Patron Saint of School Girls was published by Tall-Lighthouse in 2010. She is Emerging Poet in Residence at Kingston University and a 2011/12 Arvon Jerwood mentee. Her cycle of poems focused on the canals of Coventry and its hinterland are wonderfully evocative, and portray a firm sense of place and of the past.

VAHNI CAPILDEO's poetry has been widely anthologized. She teaches at the University of Glasgow. Her first collection, No Traveller Returns ( Salt, 2003) was followed by Undraining Sea (Egg Box, 2009) and was Highly Commended in the Forward Prize in 2009. Dark and Unaccustomed Words is just published; a fourth collection, Utter, is forthcoming.

JANE DRAYCOTT's latest collection Over was shortlisted for the 2009 T S Eliot Prize. Nominated three times for the Forward Prize for Poetry, her first two full collections, Prince Rupert's Drop and The Night Tree, were both Poetry Society Recommendations. Other collections include Christina the Astonishing (with Peter Hay and Lesley Saunders) and Tideway, a long sequence of poems about London's working river (with paintings by Peter Hay). Nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets in 2004. She teaches on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster. Her new translation of the 14th century dream-vision Pearl (2011), is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and was a Stephen Spender Prize-winner.

Those reading from the Back Room Poets this evening include Matt Bright, Gina Wilson and Jenyth Worsley.

GILES GOODLAND was born in Taunton, was educated at the universities of Wales and California, took a D.Phil at Oxford, has published several books of poetry including A Spy in the House of Years, Capital, What the Things Sang and Gloss. He works as a lexicographer and lives in West London; he writes also on Shakespeare. A versatile poet, not pinned down to any particular style or format, he is critically acclaimed; he won the 2010 Cardiff International Poetry Competition. This evening's recital will include readings from his newly published collection The Dumb Messengers.

PAULA CLAIRE started to write poetry in 1961, newly graduated from University College in London; her first publication was in 1968 and her first reading in 1969. She met Bob Cobbing - the hub of British avant garde poetry until his death in 2002 - in 1969, and he was to have a major influence on the direction her poetry would take in the following years; for over 25 years they performed together as part of Koncrete Canticle. Still giving recitals, Paula also runs her own Archive of Sound and Visual Poetry, the largest collection of such work in the UK, and she is a recognized authority on twentieth-century avant garde poetry. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts 2003 in recognition of a lifetime devoted to poetry. Paula does not use the term 'audience' because ever since her first recital she has incorporated vocal participation and considers poetry to be an oral and communal art. She has devised two kinds of participation: 'responsive voices', simple repetitions of key words and phrases, and 'interactive voices', which involves everyone having an annotated text.

The world's leading jazz violinist, Christian Garrick with his regular accompanist Dave Gordon, lead an evening of jazz and poetry.

Christian's father, jazz pianist and composer Michael Garrick, was musical director of Jeremy Robson's Poetry and Jazz Roadshow which featured legendary poets Laurie Lee, Adrian Mitchell, Vernon Scannell, Spike Milligan and many others. Michael Garrick was also a poet himself, and tonight's concert will be interspersed with some of his poetry.

HELEN MOORE is an ecopoet based in Frome, Somerset. Helen publishes poetry, essays and reviews in various anthologies and journals. She regularly performs her poetry at events and conferences around the UK, and also works as a children's author, community artist and Forest Schools practitioner (Shared Earth Learning Project and Bath Forest School).

Irish poet NIALL McDEVITT confronts taboo subjects such as unemployment, alienation, poverty, immigration, not with confessions but with parables. Art and the artistic genius of London is ringingly affirmed. Here we depart from the 'whatever you say, say nothing' school. McDevitt is a maverick in the David Gascoyne/John Wieners/Michael Hartnett line. He has worked as an actor with Ken Campbell's company, as Pidgin poet/translator on John Peel's Home Truths, and as an activist has campaigned to secure the future of the Rimbaud/Verlaine House at 8 Royal College Street, and for the release of poet Saw Wai from Insein prison in Burma. His collection b/w was published by Waterloo Press.

DANNY CHIVERS is a freelance environmental writer, researcher, and activist based in Oxford. You might expect so-called eco-warriors to be bull-horn wielding bullies who crash and stamp around with their agendas gouged into their boot heels, but there is another kind as well. A kinder, gentler, fluffier brand of tree-hugging gadfly who smiles as he scolds and rhymes as he teaches. He's a self-proclaimed eco-geek who besides being a teacher, a freelance writer, a social commentator, an analyst and an activist is a performance poet who thinks of himself as a "cheerful mischief-maker."

From Oxford, England, young Chivers began his foray into performance poetry in 2006 upon achieving his second masters degree and by 2007 became that town's unlikely Hammer & Tongue Slam Poetry Champion. His poems use wit and simple rhyming schemes to point out the folly of modern energy use and and tackles such topics as global warming, nuclear power, coal, and consumerism run amok. His delivery is upbeat, fast-paced and even quite silly at times, but this surface treacle hides biting sarcasm and hard-hitting social commentary the likes of which would make Dr. Suess himself proud (remember the cute little Lorax and his poor little forest?).

MICHAEL HOROVITZ is simply a poetry legend. The youngest of ten children brought to England from Nazi Germany, Michael studied at Brasenose and whilst still a student started his magazine New Departures, publishing Burroughs, Beckett, Stevie Smith, Ginsberg and others. Associated with the British Poetry Revival, he attained folklore prominence when he performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965 alongside Ginsberg (a close friend) and Alexander Trocchi; in 1969 Penguin published his Children of Albion Anthology. Michael is perhaps the Albion Beatnik primus inter pares, and has performed on his own, with the American beats, with younger British poets, in a touring jazz show (and still with British jazz legend and pianist Stan Tracey) for over 50 years. Michael stood as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 2010 as a late entry candidate (and was enthusiastically supported by the Albion Beatnik).

DAN HOLLOWAY is the poet laureate of the Albion Beatnik: his poetry is visceral, emotional and raw. He is also the Colonel Bilko of the Oxford Literary Unestablishment, an internet (and tactile) publisher, founder of Eight Cuts Gallery, and a prolific blogger.

PAUL ASKEW is the poetic sex thimble of Oxford, a promiscuous performer, using repetitive sound and internal rhyme, tells stories and nags at the surreal or comic sides of things.

MARIA ROSENDO PRIEGO was born in 1984 and has lived in Vigo, the olive tree city, until the age of eighteen when she began a journey that took her from Compostela to Madrid, Sweden, Buenos Aires and Chiapas. With her restlessness as background, the poems move in search of a space of their own, a space that from now on will be built of capital letters; the spaces she walks through have women's names, the women in whom she seeks the truth of knowing that we are free. In Spring 2011 she published her first collection of poems, Nomade, which was awarded the XXIII Xosé María Pérez Pallaré National Poetry Prize. In 2010 she also won the VII O Condado Feminist Literary Contest. She knows that the path to emancipation lies in the strength of women.

MANO PANFORRETEIRO works as a composer, musician and actor. He seeks to remove barriers between disciplines and frontiers between cultures with his band Kibitka, his theatrical piece I Hear That in New York using the poetry of Brecht and the songs of Eisler with the German singer Sabine Müller, and to form duos with the Belorussian accordionist Vadim Yukhnevich, the Belgian saxophonist Anne Gennen and the English concertinist Anthony Dudson; this is also the essence of his artistic project Miraquenvén.

JENNY LEWIS is a poet, playwright, children's author and songwriter who specializes in cross disciplinary work combining poetry with other art forms. She first trained as a painter at the Ruskin School of Art before reading English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has published two books of poetry (When I Became an Amazon, 1996 and Fathom, Carcanet 2007) and has had several plays and poetry cycles performed at theatres across the UK including her verse drama After Gilgamesh (for Pegasus Theatre, Oxford) in 2011. She teaches poetry at Oxford University and her next collection, Taking Mesopotamia, is forthcoming from Carcanet.

Jenny will be reading with nine local poets drawn from Stanza II and others, including David Attwooll, Stella Shakerchi, Julie Dyson, Jane Spiro, John Daniel, Ben Parker and Caroline Dixon-Ward, with musical interludes from the Albion Sputnik Austerity Quartet and Mark Bosley.

PATRICK McGUINNESS was born in Tunisia in 1968 of Belgian and Newcastle Irish parents, and brought up in Iran, Venezuela, France, Belgium and Romania. He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature, and his books include two collections of poems, The Canals of Mars (2004) and Jilted City (2010), and several editions, notably of the modernist poet Lynette Roberts and T.E. Hulme, and a translation of Mallarmé's For Anatole's Tomb. He also writes under the pseudonym Liviu Campanu, a Romanian poet exiled to Constanta, whose sequence City of Lost Walks appears in Patrick's collection Jilted City. Originally Mr Campanu was invented as a character for Patrick's novel, The Last Hundred Days, and was given a few lines of poetry then dropped from the novel for slowing down its already glacial pace. He was recuperated as a stand-alone poet, and his collection, translated by Patrick, will appear in English in 2013 as City of Lost Walks. Patrick appears often on the radio.

RICHARD GWYN was brought up in South Wales. After anthropology at the LSE and a brief sojourn as punk poet, rising to support act for The Cure, he became in turn a London milkman, a Cretian fisherman and a pilgrim in Northern Spain. He now wears long trousers as Director of the MA in Creative Writing at Cardiff University. He has had many collections of poetry published, edited a Welsh anthology, and written two novels; his most recent books are Sad Giraffe Café (2010), a collection of prose poems, and The Vagabond's Breakfast (2011).

PHILIP MORRE is a second-hand and antiquarian bookseller based in Venice. Venice is an intermittent presence in his poems. His first full collection of poetry, The Sadness of Animals, has been published recently.

BERNARD O'DONOGHUE was born in Cullen, Co. Cork in 1945. He is a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, where he teaches Medieval English. He has published six collections of poetry including The Weakness (1991), Gunpowder (winner of the 1995 Whitbread Award for Poetry), Here Nor There (1999), Outliving (2003) and Farmers Cross (2011); his Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008. He is recognized as one of the leading poets writing today.

JOHN ELINGER was born in 1935 and lives in Jericho, Oxford (and is a member of the Jericho Poets). He has recently published two collections of poems, Still Life and Operatic Interludes. He won the first prize in the Local Poems Competition of 2009. He prefers formal to free verse, and is interested in the poetry of ideas as much as that of feeling.

PATRICK MACKIE published Excerpts From the Memoirs Of A Fool with Carcanet when in his early twenties, and he has been published since by Poetry Review and the Paris Review. He was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard in the late-1990s, and is currently researching a book on Mozart.

Oh yeh, John taught Bernard, Bernard taught Patrick.

The NEW LIBERTINES stand for human experience in its glorious, messy, complex entirety, and stand against everything that is blank, bleak, and brutal, one dimensional or slick in contemporary culture, especially current literary culture. With roots that spread to burlesque, Beat, fin de siecle France and ecstatic mystics before slapping its influences around the face with a knuckle-dusting of postmodern wit and Modernist anger, New Libertinism is a celebration of light in dark corners, desire in the face of boredom, despair hidden beneath the underskirts of affluence - of everything it means to be human.

A night of decadence, darkness and wit from the Oxford-based proggers of the poetry world whose touring show has played to full houses in Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford, Covent Garden Poetry Cafe, Chipping Norton Literary Festival and Stoke Newington Literary Festival.

JO BELL is a former archaeologist and boat dweller. She has been Glastonbury Festival Poet in Residence, Director of National Poetry Day and Cheshire Poet Laureate. Her collection Navigation charts her journey through tricky relationships, odd occupations and into boat-dwelling. A native of the Peak District, she made a 250-mile odyssey by canal to Wiltshire this summer and is writing a non-fiction book about it.

HELEN MORT was born in Sheffield in 1985. Her collection Division Street is forthcoming from Chatto & Windus. She has published two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse, The Shape of Every Box and A Pint for the Ghost, which was a Poetry Book Society choice for spring 2010. She was Poet in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere from 2010-2011, and is currently researching metaphor, contemporary poetry, and the influence of neuroscience at Sheffield University.

ALAN BUCKLEY moved from Merseyside to Oxford in the 1980s to study English Literature and has lived there ever since. His pamphlet Shiver (tall-lighthouse) was a Poetry Book Society choice for summer 2009. He has won first prize in the Wigtown Poetry Competition, been commended twice in the Bridport Prize, and was shortlisted for the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize. He works for the charity First Story as a writer in residence at a local secondary school.

With musical interludes from Lewis Newcombe-Jones on guitar.

JAMIE McKENDRICK was born in Liverpool in 1955. He is the author of six collections of poetry: The Sirocco Room (1991), The Kiosk on the Brink (1993), The Marble Fly (1997, winner of the Forward Poetry Prize, Best Poetry Collection of the Year, and a Poetry Book Society Choice), Ink Stone (2003, which was shortlisted for the 2003 TS Eliot Prize and the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award), Crocodiles & Obelisks (2007, shortlisted for the Forward Prize), and a brilliant new collection, Out There, is just published in October this year; a selection of his poems was published as Sky Nails in 2000. He is editor of 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004) and his translations of Magrelli, Pasolini and Bassani have been published.

MARK FORD was born in 1962. He has published three collections of poetry with Faber, Landlocked (1992), Soft Sift (2001) and Six Children (2011). He is also the author of a critical biography of Raymond Roussel and a two collections of essays. He teaches in the English Department at University College, London.

Brilliant beat singer and poet Sarah Gillespie returns to the Albion Beatnik with song and poetry, much inspired by the American Beatniks. With much sought after and world renown saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and brilliant piano discovery Max Turnball, repertoire from her last three recordings will be interspersed with some of her beat inspired poetry, often with musical accompaniment. A very exciting evening is promised, with twists and new explorations of old (and new) material.

Gilad Atzmon is simply one of the world's finest and most inventive jazz saxophonists and an outspoken commentator on the state of Jewish identity.

ISOBEL DIXON lives in Cambridge, works in London, and returns often to her native South Africa. She has published three collections of poetry: Weather Eye, A Fold In the Map, and last year's The Tempest Prognosticator.

ROISIN TIERNEY was born in Dublin in 1963 and studied Psychology and Philosophy at University College Dublin, and moved to London in 1985; along the way she lived in Spain. Her recent collection, Dream Endings, won the Michael Marks Pamphlet Award 2012. It begins with a glimpse of the poet's dying sister and concludes in high style with an unusually exuberant funeral; in between, Dream Endings assembles a cast of misfits and eccentrics to explore illness, madness, incest and death. Chair of Judges Alan Jenkins said "Roisin Tierney's subjects may be the dark ones of human vulnerability and anguish, but the poems in this wonderfully cohesive and well-organized sequence rest on solid and graceful foundations of precision, musicality and wit."

SIMON BARRACLOUGH is the author of the Forward-shortlisted Los Alamos Mon Amour (2008), the limited edition mini-book Bonjour Tetris (2010) and a second full collection, Neptune Blue (2011); his most recent publication is Psycho Poetica (2012).