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Centre for Poetry and Poetics Presents a reading with Allen Fisher and Kelvin Corcoran

Poet, painter, and art historian Allen Fisher has over 160 single-author publications, with his two most recent artist’s books Black Pond (2020) and proceeds in the garden, after Dante’s Paradiso. Fisher worked in the City Lead Works from 1962 until the ’70s, performed with Fluxus in Britain in the ’70s, and studied physics, human physiology, drawing and color, and art history at Goldsmiths and Essex. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and editor of the journal Spanner and Spanner Editions and co-publisher of Aloes Books, New London Pride, and Edible Magazine.

Kelvin Corcoran grew up in the English Midlands the son of an alcoholic Irish father and loving mother. As a child he benefited from free school milk and the family allowance, which was essential. By virtue of a good teacher, he went to university and read poetry. His first book was published in 1985. He was a teacher for 33 years and then for a while a voluntary worker in the NHS. After the discovery of poetry, the second great change in his life was meeting his wife, Melanie. His work belongs to no school and has been consistently praised for its lyricism and intelligence, commended by the Poetry Society and the Forward Prize committee and commissioned by the Arts Council and Medicine Unboxed. He lives in Brussels, Greece and Penwith in Cornwall.

Kelvin will be reading from Collected Poems (Shearsman, 2023). Kelvin writes in his afterword to the Collected:

'The poems collected here were written and published between 1985 through to 2023. Almost all of this poetry was written in sequences or entire books rather than as separate poems. I’ve aimed to keep that feature with some trimming. I’ve excluded some early work in order to avoid repetition, and omitted the books written with the late Alan Halsey, precisely because they are collaborations and not my work alone. One day I would like to collect all those books in one volume in order to restate the lasting pleasure of having worked with Alan. In compiling these poems I’ve kept in mind Jane Harrison’s remarks in Epilegomena To The Study Of Greek Religion, that all poetry is about praise or blame, celebration or satire. I don’t exclude myself from this second category and I can be fairly selective about what fits in the first. I hope there is plenty of both qualities here.'

(Collected Poems, back cover headlines):

“Corcoran has as wide a range and as rich a vocabulary as any poet now writing. He possesses a flawless ear, a fresh eye for image and detail, penetrating analysis and a storyteller’s gift. He can shift registers suddenly, from lyric to formal mode to common speech, and even a snatch of song. . . Kelvin Corcoran is one of the rare true poets. Reading him is a privilege and a pleasure, a new awareness.”
David Wevill.

“Corcoran is a superbly skilled lyricist.”
Frances Leviston, The Guardian.

“Kelvin Corcoran has allied a strikingly individual intelligence to a genuinely musical sensibility.”
Don Paterson, The Observer.

“The ‘straight music’ of the English lyrical tradition drives these poems that are honed, hard, elegant and economic. Then, suddenly, brilliance flashes out against the grain, in the flaws. It is ‘the ripped voice makes us free’.”
Rosmarie Waldrop.

“Corcoran is at the front of contemporary poetry: the lyric grace of his language is threaded with an historical perspective that raises the poetry far beyond the world of a localised present.” Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence.

“Kelvin Corcoran’s recent work inhabits the imagination as a distinct sphere of abundance, drawn from reality as a celebration of the true scope of the mind. And the instrument of this is a written eloquence which takes in the past of poetry and of the spirit as a freshly lived condition.”
Peter Riley, PN Review.

“Kelvin Corcoran is a writer for whom politics and poetics are inseparable; his work demonstrates an exhilarating truth, that wit and irony need not exclude passion and trust in the pursuit of poetry.”
Ken Edwards, The New British Poetry.

9TH OF NOVEMBER – 6.30pm: Diamond, LT2

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