News Archive

The Poetry Society in association with the Arts Theatre presents:

Robert Minhinnick under the influence
of Derek Walcott

Thursday 22 May at 7.00 pm
Tickets: £10 / £7 (Concessions and Poetry Society members)
At the Arts Theatre, 6/7 Great Newport Street, London, WC2H 7JB

The highly popular ‘Under the Influence’ series, where one poet looks at the influence another poet has had on their work, continues in 2008 with an exciting new line up and venue.

West Indian poet Derek Walcott’s collection Sea Grapes inspired Welsh poet, Robert Minhinnick to explore his own language and landscape and find that the ‘bwlch’ and ‘gwter’ of his ‘own scrap of coast’ could be poetic.

Robert Minhinnick, has published poetry and two collections of essays. His book of essays on the Welsh environment, Watching the Fire Eater, won the Wales Book of the Year Award in 1993. Amongst his many awards are an Eric Gregory Award, a John Morgan Award, two Arts Council of Wales Literature Prizes and a Cholomondeley Award.

 He founded Friends of the Earth Cymru (Wales) in 1984 and has worked as a writer in residence in Canada. His book, To Babel and Back won the 2006 Wales Book of the Year Award.  His poetry collections include A Thread in the Maze (1978); Native Ground (1979); Life Sentences (1983); The Dinosaur Park (1985); The Looters (1989); and Hey Fatman (1994), Selected Poems (1999), After the Hurricane (2002). He has also translated from Welsh, The Adulterer’s Tongue: An Anthology of Welsh Poetry in Translation. His debut novel, Sea Holly, was published in 2007.

Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. He has written  plays for stage and radio as well as poetry. His first collection,  In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962), brought him to public attention. Since then he has published, The Gulf and Other Poems (1969), The Castaway and Other Poems (1965) and Omeros (1990), an epic poem which invokes the lives and voices of the people of the Caribbean through Greek myth and epic, The Prodigal (2005) and his latest collection Selected Poems published in 2007. For many years he has divided his time between Trinidad and the US. His experience of the Caribbean and of living between two cultures has strongly influenced his work.

Also coming up in the Under The Influence series:

Thursday 26 June at 7.00 pm
Lemn Sissay under the influence of the Liverpool Poets

Wednesday 16 July at 7.00 pm
Yang Lian under the influence of Ezra Pound

The host for each event will be the Poetry Society’s Chair, Anne-Marie Fyfe.

Tickets
Cost: £10 / £7 (Concessions and Poetry Society members).
Ticket Booking Number: 0844 847 1608 or in person at the venue.
Find out more on www.poetrysociety.org.uk