About this Event
We're delighted to be working with the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing to host Victoria Kennefick and Declan Ryan as part of their Literature Live series. Victoria and Declan will be reading from and talking about their new poetry collections EGG/SHELL and CRISIS ACTOR. Hosted by John McAuliffe.
Doors: 6.30, starts: 6.45
Tickets are £3.00 or free when pre-ordering a copy of either book.EGG/SHELL and CRISIS ACTOR will also be available to purchase on the night and Victoria and Declan will be signing copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or [email protected] and we can arrange this for you.
About the books:
Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick
The Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2024
'It is hard to hurt and then explain the hurt away / so as not to hurt anyone. But have you seen / my life?' ('Child of Lir')
The lives depicted by Victoria Kennefick alter, shatter and recombine in stunning monologues, innovative hybrid forms and piercing lyrics: her second book Egg/Shell is a diptych, a double album, which explores early motherhood and miscarriage, and the impact of a spouse's gender transition and the dissolution of a marriage. Acclaimed as one of the boldest poetic voices to emerge in recent years, Kennefick, in the follow-up to her best-selling Eat or We Both Starve, breaks new ground with generosity, emotional complexity, formal ingenuity and wit.
Crisis Actor by Declan Ryan
Crisis Actor chronicles various failures and farewells. It is peopled by faded heroes and deferential devotees; a hanged donkey, a bloated rat; solitary bachelors and disillusioned youths - these are the watchers, not the players. The poems are awash with rueful self-accusation and laconic scepticism. There are touching elegies, reportage and bruised, wary replayings. A blistering sequence about boxers and their fates weaves through the collection. The overwhelming sense is of life going on elsewhere, the halcyon days and brightest of years long past. This is the aftermath of being one who - in Matthew Arnold's words - 'has reached his utmost limits and finds . . . himself far less than he had imagined himself'.
But there are still flashes of camaraderie, of stars aligning: lunchtimes in sunlit garden squares, languorous pub afternoons, cheering on and hard-won triumphs. These precious, precarious moments point to how we might reclaim potential, discover human connection in times of defeat or despair, and reach towards grace and redemption.
About the authors:
Victoria Kennefick grew up in Cork and lives in Kerry. Her debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Butler Literary Prize. She was the UCD/Arts Council of Ireland Writer-in-Residence 2023 and Poet-in-Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo 2022-2024. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, New England Review, PN Review, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere.
Declan Ryan's first collection, Crisis Actor, was published by Faber & Faber in 2023. His reviews and essays have appeared in journals including New York Review of Books, The Baffler, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Observer, and New Statesman.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Blackwell's Bookshop Manchester, University Green, Manchester, United Kingdom
GBP 3.00 to GBP 12.99