Monday 9 October, 7.00pm

Online via dlr YouTube

Register on dlr Libraries eventbrite from Wed 27 September to receive event link. Link will be emailed the day before the event. Please check your spam/junk folders.

In poems which are as dynamic as they are expansive, Sara Berkeley, Dylan Brennan and Jo Clement look at the power of art to shape our perceptions of the world.

Drawing on influences ranging from the eighteenth-century printmaker Thomas Bewick, to Mexican myth and to the sudden uprooting of Covid, and engaging with the history of colonialism, these poets look at otherness, displacement, and the meaning of home. Though always aware of the threat of violence, their work is also infused with magic and craft that allows their readers to witness the joy and strangeness of being alive.

Sara Berkeley grew up in Ireland. She spent many years in the San Francisco Bay Area, and now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley where she works as a hospice nurse. She has had seven collections of poetry published, also a novel and a collection of short stories. Her poetry has been widely anthologized, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Now award. The Last Cold Day won the 2023 inaugural Yeats Society Sligo Poetry Prize.

Dividing his time between Mexico and Ireland, Dylan Brennan writes poetry and prose. He is a recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary award. In 2022 he won the inaugural Drumshanbo Written Word Weekend Poetry Film Award for ‘Four Attempts at Making a Human’, a poetry film in collaboration with Jonathan Brennan. He has read at literary festivals in Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Italy, Ireland and USA and has twice been recipient of a Culture Ireland Travel Grant. Most recently he was awarded an Arts Council literature bursary. His second collection Let the Dead (2023), is available now from Banshee Press.

Jo Clement is Managing Editor of Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine, Newcastle. She lectures Creative Writing at Northumbria University and is a Poetry Book Society collections selector. In 2012, she was selected by New Writing North and Paul Farley for a Northern Writers’ Award. Her first book-length collection, Outlandish (Bloodaxe Books) was shortlisted for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize.

Register on dlr Libraries eventbrite from Wed 27 September to receive event link.