Thursday 21 March, 7pm
The Bell
50 Middlesex Street
London E1 7EX
Nearest tubes: Aldgate, Aldgate East, Liverpool Street
Join independent poetry press Penned in the Margins for the launch of two debut collections: The Shipwrecked House by Claire Trevien & Human Form by Oliver Dixon.
Entry is free.
Both human and humane, Oliver Dixon’s debut collection of poetry maps a city and its inhabitants – from starlings and plane trees to a Stockhausen-listening street cleaner. But Human Form is as much a reflection on an interior world on the cusp of change. This book is a search for form, modes of utterance, combining elegantly crafted lyrics with dense blocks of prose poetry and fractured texts. Dixon is a poet open to invention and re-invention: reflective yet lively, philosophical yet grounded, a brilliant observer of people, place and moments of uncertainty coalescing into meaning.
Anchors, shipwrecks, whales and islands abound in this first collection by Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trévien. These poems are sketches, lyrics, dreams, and experiments in language as sound.
Trévien’s is a surreal vision, steeped in myth and music, in which everything is alive and – like the sea itself – constantly shifting form. Fishermen become owls; one woman turns into a snake, another gives birth to a tree; a glow-worm might be a wasp or ‘a toy on standby’. Struck through with brilliant and sometimes sinister imagery reminiscent of Pan’s Labyrinth or an Angela Carter novel, The Shipwrecked House is a unique and hallucinatory debut from a poet-to-watch.
