Events
Thursday 11th March 2010, 7.00pm
Amarjit Chandan, author of Sonata for Four Hands will be reading at Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Thursday 11th March 2010, 8.00pm
Lauderdale House, Highgate Hill, Waterlow Park, London N6 5HG Tel. 020 8348 8716
Shanta Acharya, Carrie Etter and Annie Freud
Shanta Acharya was born in India, educated at Oxford and
Harvard, and has lived in London since 1985. An internationally
published poet, her five books of poetry are Dreams That Spell The Light (Arc Publications, UK, 2009), Shringara (Shoestring
Press, UK; 2006), Looking In, Looking Out (Headland Publications, UK; 2005), Numbering Our Days' Illusions
(Rockingham Press, UK; 1995) and Not This, Not That (Rupa &
Co, India; 1994). Her doctoral study, The Influence of Indian
Thought on Ralph Waldo Emerson, was published by
The Edwin Mellen Press, USA, in 2001.
www.shantaacharya.com
Carrie Etter was born in the USA, and has lived in England since 2001. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University, and her first collection, The Tethers, was published by Seren Books in June 2009. As Paul
Batchelor commented in The Times, "Carrie Etter is an American expatriate, and her poetry is rootless in the best sense: it moves over wideranging territory and seems able to make itself at home anywhere. Although The Tethers is her first collection, Etter fully possesses her material," evincing "intelligence and authority."
Her pamphlet, The Son, was published by Oystercatcher Press in September 2009, and is the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Winter 2009. Annie Freud was born in London in 1948.
She is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud, maternal granddaughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and the great-grand-daughter of Sigmund Freud. She was educated at the Lycee Francais de Londres and then studied English and European
Literature at Warwick University. Since 1975, she has worked intermittently as a tapestry artist and embroiderer, exhibiting work and undertaking commissions. Her first full collection from
Picador, The Best Man Who Ever Was, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2007, and went on to receive the Glen Dimplex New Writers' Award in the same year.
Wednesday 24th March 2010, 7.30pm
THE POETRY CAFE – BETTERTON STREET, LONDON WC2 Tickets at door £5/£3 conc.
POETRY IN TRANSLATION
"The Trace they Wished to Leave"
Timothy Adès will present
Jean Cassou — Robert Desnos — Bertolt Brecht — Victor Hugo
Timothy Adès is a translator-poet who tends to work with rhyme and metre, translating mostly from French, German and Spanish. He has won awards for his versions of Cassou, Desnos, Hugo and the Mexican, Alfonso Reyes. His books to date are two volumes of Cassou's poetry, and a short version of Victor Hugo's last book of poetry, How to be a Grandfather.
Jean Cassou 1897-1986 was a major cultural figure, the creator of France's Museum of Modern Art. Imprisoned as a suspected Resistant in 1941, he composed in his head his 33 Sonnets. Serious injury and rejection led him to write The Madness of Amadis (1950); these poems, translated, are now the core of two volumes of his work. The strict form of the sonnet enabled him to memorise the poems composed in prison; Amadis, taking its name from a hero of old romance, looks deceptively like an antique ballad. The forms chosen are at odds with the modernist, often opaque yet beautiful imagery.