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 are delighted to welcome the Forward Prize winning Ian Duhig to launch his latest collection The Blind Roadmaker. Lively, bursting as ever with humour and irreverent wit with an almost Burnsian eclecticism, Duhig is at his best exploring urban poverty, determinism and social justice. His poems reflect back the consolations of poetry and music on a journey that takes in everything from a riotous reimagining of Don Juan to the tragedy of Manuel Bravo (the Leeds asylum seeker from Angola who was forced to defend himself in court, and later took his own life).
No poet today writes with such a sense of political and social conscience, and The Blind Roadmaker affirms Duhig’s belief in poetry as a means of commemorating those who least deserve to be forgotten.