Name: Four Poets Series
Start: 2024-12-11T19:00:00+00:00
Location: The Wheatsheaf, 25 Rathbone Place London W1T 1JB

Come and hear poems old and new from: Martin Figura! Helen Ivory! Isobel Dixon! David Crystal! Peter Daniels!
Martin Figura’s collection and show Whistle were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show. Shed (Gatehouse Press) and Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine (Cinnamon Press) were both published in 2016. In 2021 he was Salisbury NHS Writer in Residence; the resulting pamphlet My Name is Mercy (Fair Acre Press) won a national NHS award. A second pamphlet from Fair Acre Press Sixteen Sonnets for Care came out in October 2022. His latest collection The Remaining Men has just been published by Cinnamon Press. He lives in Norwich with Helen Ivory and sciatica.
Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She received a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award in 2024. She edits Ink Sweat and Tears and teaches for the National Centre for Writing Academy. Her chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City was published by SurVision in 2019 and the poem The Square of the Clockmaker is riding the rails as one of the Poems on the Underground. She has work translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Croatian, Spanish. Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems appeared from MadHat in the US last year. Constructing a Witch (October 2024) her sixth Bloodaxe collection is a PBS Winter Recommendation.
David Crystal was born in Prudhoe, Northumberland in 1963. He has had two previous collections from Two Rivers Press. His latest collection is Wrong Horse Home (Tall-lighthouse.) His poems explore strange days in dark times. A kind of Blue in Brockley, psychic meltdown in New Cross, love and redemption on Hilly Fields. The jazz bird, the jail bird, the crack-head looking for butterflies in a betting shop in Sydenham. All life is here, on the wrong side of the track, south of the river. Birds fly into and out of his poems, like Bede's sparrow through the mead-hall of life.
Peter Daniels has published four poetry collections, the most recent Old Men (Salt, 2024), and previous books My Tin Watermelon (Salt, 2019, which formed part of his PhD at Goldsmiths College, London), A Season in Eden (Gatehouse, 2016), and Counting Eggs (Mulfran, 2012). He has translated Vladislav Khodasévich from Russian (Angel Classics, 2013), and as queer writer in residence at the London Metropolitan Archives he wrote the obscene Ballad of Captain Rigby. www.peterdaniels.org.uk
Isobel Dixon grew up in South Africa, where her debut, Weather Eye, won the Olive Schreiner Prize. Her fifth collection, A Whistling of Birds (Nine Arches, 2023, with illustrations by Douglas Robertson) pays close attention to our threatened natural world, with echoes from other writers and artists, including D.H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bishop, and Georgia O’Keeffe. She and Doug appeared at the Edward Thomas Festival and the London Literature Festival this year. Nine Arches Press also published A Fold in the Map, The Tempest Prognosticator and Bearings. Isobel co-wrote and performed in the Titanic centenary show The Debris Field and her work is recorded for the Poetry Archive.