Carcanet book launch online: Jeffrey Wainwright in conversation with Helen Tookey

Join Manchester-based Carcanet Press to celebrate the launch of Jeffrey Wainwright’s latest poetry collection, As Best We Can. Hosting the reading and discussing the new work will be Helen Tookey, whose debut collection, Missel-Child (2014), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney first collection prize, and whose most recent, City Of Departures, was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

As always in Jeffrey Wainwright’s work, history – personal and political – is alive in the present

As Best We Can, Jeffrey Wainwright’s seventh collection, marks a change of key for the poet. After the elegiac tone of What Must Happen (2016), the poems and sequences included here settle for the poet’s present world. They listen to what dreams have to tell, and (with humour underwriting their concentration) they worry at the labour and release of creative work. As always in Jeffrey Wainwright’s work, history – personal and political – is alive in the present. ‘My Father And The Onward Tendency’ is a portrait of a man, a relationship and a cultural history of mid-20th century Britain. ‘Who Was St Chad?’ in a similar spirit evokes the poet’s mother. Memories can be events; they can also be voices.

Extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that audience members can read along – they will also have the opportunity to ask their own questions and redeem the “entry fee” against a copy of the book.