Step back in time as you descend into the twelfth century crypt of the Clerkenwell Priory for a very special book launch. In the deep atmospherics of the ancient church of the Order of St John, poet Chris McCabe introduces and reads from his stunning new collection Speculatrix. Book your place early for what promises to be an unusual and magical event in one of London’s most mysterious spaces.

About the book

In his most daring collection to date, Chris McCabe delves into the shadowy recesses of London history, bringing forth unsettling anachronisms and revealing the city as a perilous place to exist.

Taking its name from the term for a female spy, Speculatrix is at once the voyeur and the observed. Fame and death are McCabe’s subjects, sifted and strained through his poems’ urgent rhythms. At the heart of the book, a sequence of wild, neurotic sonnets tears at the corpus of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to conjure a visceral landscape of decay and financial collapse. Extending the collection beyond his trademark urban locale are startling poems for the loved and departed: from the artist Francis Bacon to the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Barry MacSweeney. In Speculatrix McCabe has pulled out all the stops, showing why he is considered one of British poetry’s most exciting and pioneering spirits.