Carcanet online book launch: Spillway by Ian Pople

Join Ian Pople as he launches his new poetry collection Spillway: New and Selected Poems, and talks about it with fellow Carcanet poet Evan Jones.

His poems explore England, the larger world, and how changing perspectives readjust the sense of home, dealing with borders, crossings and boundaries.

Recently seen chatting to Peter Sansom at the launch of Lanyard, also published by Manchester’s Carcanet Press, Ian Pople is a man of the world. Born in Ipswich, he was educated at the British Council, Athens, and the universities of Aston, Manchester and Nottingham. He has travelled extensively and has taught English in secondary and higher education in Greece, Sudan and Saudi Arabia as well as the UK, where he taught at the University of Manchester for over 20 years. As such, his poems explore England, the larger world, and how changing perspectives readjust the sense of home, dealing with borders, crossings and boundaries, addressing transitions in space and time, and the ways life and relationships change and adapt to illness, love, estrangement and loss.

The publisher says: “The traveller changes identities as he moves, responding to different surroundings, and the early poems collected here provide a varied retrospect, moving through Africa, Europe and Asia – so that we read the more recent work from a different perspective. The travel poems explore the range of reactions, appropriations and misappropriations as physical and psychological boundaries are crossed. More recent writing responds to music and the visual arts, using assemblages or bricolage to convey the painfully familiar experience of displacement, dislocation. There are poems that answer back to figures from jazz history, Roland Kirk, Dupree Bolton and Pat Metheny among them. It is wonderful to encounter such an accomplished and varied a body of work which shares with us its vivid spaces and tones. Pople, one of the most lucid critics of modern and contemporary—especially American—poetry, is an original artist in his own right.”

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.

For more readings by Carcanet poets, check out the Kendal Poetry Festival line-up here.