Carcanet online book launch: Jenny King

Jenny King launches her debut collection, Moving Day, with readings and chat with fellow Carcanet Press poet, and co-director of The Poetry Business, Peter Sansom. The event will also allow audience members to have the opportunity to ask their own questions and the text will be shown during the readings so that you can read along.

Jenny King’s poems have appeared in PN Review, The North, Stand, The Rialto and Orbis, and she has published three pamphlets.

Born in London during the Blitz, Jenny studied English at Cambridge, taught in Shrewsbury then moved to Sheffield, where she still lives. Jenny King’s poems have appeared in PN Review, The North, Stand, The Rialto and Orbis, and she has published three pamphlets: Letting The Dark Through, in 1981, Tenants, in 2014, and last year’s Midsummer, the most recent two with The Poetry Business imprint Smith | Doorstop. Her work also features in the Carcanet anthology New Poetries VIII, which launched recently.

Here’s what Carcanet says: “Her poems view the world calmly, thoughtfully. They consider memory, peace and its opposite, the inwardness and variety of the natural world, and how the individual to relates to others. All the poems in Moving Day are concerned with the interest and excitement of language itself. Some use traditional patterns in unexpected ways, sometimes including rhyme, sometimes in more fluid forms. They work for clarity and memorable perception. Accessible language and natural rhythms are always important though used variously. Looking into the known – or half-known – past of family history, the poem can disclose the fallibility of memory but also how a present relates to past and how the present with its difficulties intrudes on any consideration of how to live. These poems result from a long writing life and study of both past and contemporary poets.”

Registration for this online event costs £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – all attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to purchase the book direct from Manchester’s independent poetry publisher Carcanet during and after the event.