About the Event
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Dream Latitudes
I am drawing a map of distances.
The swimmer. The sleeper. The dreamer.
Another afternoon traipsing the incomprehensible
corridors of the brain. Nothing uttered.
Alia Kobuszko’s poetry is as immediate as it is mysterious. She is unafraid of detonating form or trusting a quiet phrase, and saturates these poems with surreal and sensuous aspects. In this enchanting and piercing debut, strange horses gallop – embodying metamorphic freedom and power. The speaker becomes the rider, the horse itself and even the field, enacting how the poet inhabits and unanchors their subject so that ‘girl and horse / stand still – / field runs through them.’
The Tree Is Missing
In one story, I stay in that city forever;
in one I board, and in another I am still waiting.
I am daybreak; I am everywhere.
In The Tree Is Missing, Shannon Kuta Kelly explores the poetics of the border. The collection crosses through non-places, moving between the unnamed and unmapped spaces on the edges of the European city. With remarkable poise and restraint, these itinerant poems experiment with oral history and translation, traversing the borderlines of nation, language and time. They draw on folklore to evoke a world that feels immediate but can now only be reached through storytelling. In doing so, Kuta Kelly explores the loss and displacement – the fracture of identity – necessitated by personal and political turmoil. She writes with a restless immediacy while evoking the histories that continue to shape us.
Gravity Archives
Andrew Motion’s new collection gives a moving account of the friction and interplay between past and present. In the opening elegies for friends and former versions of the self, and in the long title sequence that completes the book, he explores the ways in which regrets compete with hope, and the appetite for life is always prey to the hard facts of mortality. The energy and reach of these poems opens a new chapter in Motion’s writing, remaining true to the elegiac subjects that have been his main concern, while adding new depths of pathos and resonance.
Yiewsley
This autobiographical collection explores Daljit Nagra’s experiences growing up from the sixties to the eighties in the predominantly white working-class town of Yiewsley, close to Heathrow airport in outer London. As Britain transitions from a post-war manufacturing economy to the Thatcher years and the computer age, we see a young boy navigating childhood friendships and mishaps. The poems bring to life a bustling house filled with relatives from India who have arrived, legally or otherwise, in the UK: ‘devout realists already, and always, knuckled into work’. They also offer powerful insight into the makings of the writer: the ‘messy English’ at home fuse with Bollywood ballads, Top of the Pops and hymns at school, to develop a voice entirely Nagra’s own.
Whatto Expect
Everything you need to know about this Faber Members event:
- This event is taking place at Faber’s premises at The Bindery, 51 Hatton Garden, London EC1N 8HN.
- The nearest underground stations are Chancery Lane (Central line) and Farringdon (Circle line, Elizabeth line, Hammersmith & City line, Metropolitan line).
- Age guidance: this event is suitable for ages 18+
- The ticket price includes a welcome drinks reception from 6:30 p.m.
- Signed copies of books by the featured authors will be available to buy using contactless payment.
- A concessionary rate of £5 off tickets is available for anyone who is a student, unemployed, low-waged, low-pensioned or who consider the cost of the event a barrier to attending. Use code Concession5 in the promo box in the checkout.
- This is a ticketless event - there will be a guest list with your name and the number of tickets you have bought.
About the Authors
Alia Kobuszko is a poet based in London. Her work has been published in magazines including Magma, Propel and And Other Poems.
About the Authors
Shannon Kuta Kelly lives in Belfast, where she is a fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre. Her writing has appeared in such publications as the New England Review, Poetry Ireland Review and the Irish Times.
Andrew Motion was UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009, is co-founder of the online Poetry Archive and has written acclaimed biographies of Philip Larkin and John Keats among others. His memoir of childhood, In the Blood, was published in 2006, and its sequel, Sleeping on Islands: A Life in Poetry, appeared alongside Selected Poems: 1977 - 2022 in 2023. He is Homewood Professor in the Arts at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Baltimore.
Daljit Nagra is professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University of London, vice president of the Royal Society of Literature and lead advisor to Poetry By Heart. He also presents the weekly Poetry Extra on Radio 4 Extra. Nagra’s collections have won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem and Best First Book, the South Bank Show Decibel Award and the Cholmondeley Award. He lives with his family in Harrow.
