School of Night: Adam Crothers and a StAnza Preview

The School of Night – inspired by the group which included Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh – is our Year Round Poetry Festival.  Curated with the help of Don Paterson and playing host to poets as varied as Paul Muldoon and Lorraine Mariner, Simon Armitage and Annie Freud it is anchored to a regular fixture on the last Tuesday of every month. The School of Night offers the chance to explore and discuss the work of some of the best poets on the contemporary scene, and with 3 of shortlisted poets for 2015’s T S Eliot Prize having visited last year, it really is the place to find the best and the brightest the poetry scene has to offer!

We will be kicking off 2016 in style with a visit from up-and-coming poet Adam Crothers. Adam’s first collection, Several Deer, is replete with rhyme, rhythm and all the finessed rhetorical flourishes of a fine verbal draughtsman. Taking inspiration from a wide range of sources, Anselm Kiefer via John Lennon to Tennyson, subjects from destruction to to rock and roll are treated with a consolingly cynical gaze, demonstrating the empathy and human warmth behind the construction that endears to human ears.

Adam, a Northern-Irishman living in Cambridge,  is a man immersed in literature working as a library assistant, literary critic, teacher and Commissioning Editor for online magazine The Literateur.

In honour of St Andrews’ very own and very brilliant yearly poetry festival StAnza we’re also hosting a brief sneak peek at the 2016 StAnza program! We’ll be joined by Festival director Eleanor Livingstone, Programme Co-ordinator Annie Rutherford and a number of StAnza Poets for some readings and general frivolity. 

‘The rollicking Adam Crothers confesses a preference for form ‘’as jester or saboteur’’ . There is menace and mischief in equal measure.’ – The Guardian

‘There may be a little Tennyson in the lighting here, but there’s also Kanye and Austin Powers and an associative sequencing of phrases reminiscent of Frederick Seidel and Paul Muldoon.’ – The Irish Times