Deborah Harvey’s New Poetry Collection
Tuesday 17th September on the John Sebastian Lightship
Doors open 7pm readings start 7.30pm
‘Love the Albatross’ is a meditation on inter-generational relationships, estrangement and silence, in which people communicate through messages in bottles, birds and dreams, fragmented memories assume mythological status, and the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions escape their labyrinths and run wild.
Parent-child estrangement is a largely taboo subject that’s rarely discussed, such is the social stigma surrounding it. These poems are for those on both sides of the divide. They contain no judgement; they are merely an attempt to break the silence and give agency to those caught up in it.
Deborah Harvey has an MA in Creative Writing and is co-director of The Leaping Word, a poetry consultancy providing creative and editorial advice for writers. She runs poetry groups, and the long-standing open mic, Silver Street Poetry. With her fellow IsamBards, she conducts poetry walks in Bristol and surrounding area.
Deborah’s poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies, broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please, and awarded several prizes. Love the Albatross (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2024) is her sixth poetry collection.
Website: https://theleapingword.com/
Twitter Deborah Harvey Poetry @DeborahEHarvey
Deborah will be supported by featured acts
Chaucer Cameron is the author of In an Ideal World I’d not Be Murdered (Against the Grain 2021). She has been published in: Poetry Wales, Under the Radar, Poetry Salzburg, The North, and Tears in the Fence, and was shortlisted for Live Canon International Poetry Competition 2021. Chaucer is creator of Wild Whispers poetry film project and co-editor of the online magazine Poetry Film Live. Chaucer’s poetry film collection adapted from her book is now touring nationally and internationally.
Website: www.chaucercameron.com
Twitter Chaucer @ChaucerCameron
Melanie Branton is the paramilitary wing of post-menopausal spinsters. She is currently thoroughly enjoying touring her show The Full English, which tells the history of the English language, from gangs of gung-ho Anglo-Saxons to gammons and Covidiots, through the media of performance poetry, silly hats and dad jokes. Her published collections are My Cloth-Eared Heart (Oversteps, 2017), Can You See Where I’m Coming From? (Burning Eye, 2018) and The Full English (self-published, 2023). She was longlisted in the 2022 National Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the 2023 Bridport Prize for Poetry.
Website: https://melaniebranton.wordpress.com/
Twitter Melanie Branton @sapiencedowne