Black Eyes Publishing UK is pleased to announce the online (via Zoom) launch of Sue Finch's First Poetry Collection, 'Magnifying Glass'. The event will be hosted by Josephine Lay of 'Black Eyes', with readings by Sue, Helen Ivory, Anna Saunders, Georgi Gill & others.
This is a Ticketed Event, get your free ticket here, https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86999823077?pwd=endXcS9ya1NkOUJLRE8vNTFqRHFDUT09
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Sue Finch was born in Kent in 1970 and grew up in Herne Bay. She studied for a B.Ed (Hons) at West Sussex Institute of Education. She has worked in Primary Education since 1993.
Studying for her Masters in Creative Writing with Manchester Metropolitan University gave her the opportunity to work with students and staff at the Writing School. This enabled this collection of work to become a book.
She lives in Flintshire with her wife and enjoys walking up and around Moel Famau, strolls around Chester Zoo and exploring the coast and countryside of Snowdonia.
Stories and poems were a key feature of Sue’s childhood. Read to each evening by her mother before bed, she credits this with giving her a fascination for fairy tales and the lessons that can be learned from reading. When her mother said, I don’t know where you get your ideas from, Sue was quick to credit her mother for the dedication to the comfort of bedtime stories, early library membership and the encouragement to escape into books and reemerge changed.
This enrichment of imagination gave Sue the inspiration to swirl words around and rearrange them until they say what she wants them to say. Reworking and redrafting poetry often involves Sue taking a poem for a walk or letting it rest during a night’s sleep to return to in the morning. Sue takes pleasure in crafting a poem in this way and watching it evolve until it reaches a stopping point for her and can then be offered to her readers.
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Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and is tutor and Course Director for the UEA/National Centre for Writing online creative writing programme.
She has won an Eric Gregory Award and her fifth Bloodaxe Books collection, The Anatomical Venus was short-listed for the East Anglian Book Awards (2019) and won the East Anglian Writers ‘By the Cover’ Award (EABA 2019). The Anatomical Venus examines how women have been portrayed as ‘other’; as witches; as hysterics with wandering wombs and as beautiful corpses cast in wax, or on mortuary slabs in TV box sets, is available here: www.bloodaxebooks.com
Fool’s World a collaborative Tarot with the artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press) won the 2016 Saboteur Award for Best Collaborative Work. Hear What the Moon Told Me, a book of collage/ mixed media/ acrylic painted poems was published in 2016 by Knives Forks and Spoons Press, and a chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City was published in January 2019 by SurVision. She lives in Norwich with her husband, the poet Martin Figura.
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Anna Saunders has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything’ by The North, ‘a modern myth maker’ by Paul Stephenson, and Tears in the Fence said of her ‘Anna Saunders’ poetry is reminiscent of Plath – with all its alpha achievement and radiance’.
She is the author of Communion, (Wild Conversations Press), Struck, (Pindrop Press) Kissing the She Bear, (Wild Conversations Press), Burne Jones and the Fox (Indigo Dreams), and Ghosting for Beginners, (Indigo Dreams).
Anna’s forthcoming book is Feverfew. (Indigo Dreams – due 2021). The collection has been described as ‘rich with obsession, sensuousness and potency’ by Ben Ray, and ‘a beautiful and necessary collection’ by Penny Shuttle.
She is also the Executive Director of Cheltenham Poetry Festival and works as a creative writing tutor and mentor, communications specialist, journalist, broadcaster and copywriter/editor.
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Georgi Gill is a poet and PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh, exploring the role of poetry in dialogues about multiple sclerosis. Georgi is the editor of The Interpreter’s House magazine. She is also a member of 12, a group of female poets based in Scotland and occasionally performs with them. In 2018 she collaborated with the experimental composer Isabel Benito Gutierrez and visual artist, Èlia Navarro, on an audio-video installation called Dans Les Noirceurs. Currently Georgi is Poet-in-Residence at The Anatomical Museum in Edinburgh. She is terrible at meeting submission deadlines so is surprised and grateful that her work has been published in a wide selection of journals and anthologies. She tweets sporadically @georgi_gill.
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Josephine Lay: The last two years of my life have been totally inspirational. I have been writing for over 20 years but I started focusing on poetry in 2018 after two consecutive accidents and periods of concussion. Unable to concentrate for extreme periods of time, I abandoned writing novels and found an outlet for expression in this more concise form of literature. I have two collections of poetry published by ‘Black Eyes’; ‘Inside Reality’ and ‘Unravelling’
I embrace both page and performance poetry; Anna Saunders, (CEO of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival) a good friend and mentor, says I straddle between the two; a bit ungainly but truthful. I live midway between Gloucester and Cheltenham and enjoy the differing qualities of both places, both cultures.
I thrive on diversity; I love to read page poetry but also, I enjoy listening to performance poets as well. Personally, I don't see a clear-cut boundary between the two arts. I feel it is more like a gradation of different skills; a spectrum ranging from spoken word, to the page poem. This wide range of poetic skill encompasses; flash fiction, prose poetry, confessional poetry on mental health issues and abuse, therapeutic rants, rap, slam poetry/spoken word, performance poets and, of course, the beautifully written words on the page.
Near perfection, for me, is a skilfully created page poem perfectly performed by the poet. Personally, all types of poetic skill can be considered worthy, provided that each creative writer/performer seeks to polish, improve and perfect their skills as much as possible.
It’s this reason that makes my second passion so rewarding; I love to host events; to run monthly poetry nights, I enjoy seeking out new talent and offering those poets the chance to perform before supportive and appreciative audiences. I run such a monthly event, ‘Squawkers’ at ‘The Sober Parrot’ Cheltenham, on the 3rd Friday of each month. I also enjoy promoting poetry in the community and I am, at present, ‘Poet in Residence at Cheltenham Library. I have worked in Libraries and enjoy connecting with the public especially children. While running workshops I have become heartened and amazed at the levels of talent in many young children.
My third love is helping out as Creative Adviser & Editor for ‘Black Eyes Publishing UK’. At Black Eyes we seek to help talented people get their words published at a reasonable cost to themselves. This is especially satisfying when the book we publish is the poet’s first collection.
At the start of 2020 I had the honour of being asked if I would take over the running of the Gloucestershire Poetry Society, by its then, director and founder Z.D. Dicks aka Ziggy The Poet. Naturally, I accepted.
Josephine Lay (February 2020)
