Poetry X 3 = Book Launch. Behrens,Dooley&Peake.

All welcome to help celebrate the publishing of wonderful poetry. A small reading will happen at 7.30. Signed books available. Please RSVP below.

The Star in the Branches, James Peake’s second collection, is an intense and heartfelt examination of memory, how it pains and consoles, deepens and shrinks, is both equal to, and less than, the objects and people who come to reside there. At either end of the book are the disappearances of loved ones: a parent succumbing to dementia, and a school friend lost to more voluntary forms of forgetting.

Elsewhere are poems of erotic love, big city loneliness, and the boon and burden of family, poems of praise in which the spiritual and the tangible are not remote but intimate. From the ancient quarries of Naxos to the electronica of Aphex Twin, these highly distinctive poems celebrate the unique wherever they find it.

James Peake has worked in trade publishing for several years, predominantly for the large conglomerates, but also for leading independents and literary agencies. He’s been a reader and editor for literary magazines in the UK and US, and his own poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His first collection, Reaction Time of Glass, was published in 2019 and launched at Vout-o-Reenee’s.

The poems in Discoveries, written over the last four years, respond to the uncertainties of our time with an unpredictability of their own. Tim Dooley makes use of varied, sometimes arbitrary, structures to explore possibilities of expression. Some poems extemporise along lines of linguistic fantasy or celebrate innovators of modernism, while others observe contemporary experience with acuity. A sobering central section, structured in 100-word prose paragraphs, revisits a source of shame at the heart of our history.

Tim Dooley is a tutor for The Poetry School and a mentor for the prison charity, Koestler Arts. He was reviews and features editor of Poetry London between 2008 and 2018, a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster from 2016 to 2021 and a judge for the John Pollard International Poetry Competition at Trinity College Dublin in 2019 and 2020. He was previously a schoolteacher for many years. His poetry collections include the Poetry Book Society Recommendations: Tenderness (Smith Doorstop, 2003), Keeping Time (Salt, 2008), and Weemoed (Eyewear, 2017).

Transitional Spaces is Kate Behrens’s fourth poetry collection and is concerned with the subtler workings of trauma and self-repair both in ourselves and the world, and in negotiating the layering of loss, including through fantasy and dream. If the natural world is our victim here, it acts too as mirror, pointer or deep consolation.

Creativity is reflected in poems that include poets, a painter, pattern-cutter and tapestry-maker and in the coded processes of psychological survival itself. With her fourth collection, Behrens attempts a new directness in many of these poems, a directness that makes them no less suggestive.

Kate Behrens was born in 1959. Two Rivers Press published The Beholder (2012), Man with Bombe Alaska (2016) and Penumbra (2019). She lives in Oxfordshire and has one child.