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Poets Robert Minhinnick, editor of Poetry Wales, and Pacale Petit, editor of Poetry London, will give a joint reading 4:10 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13, at Lafayette’s Interfaith Chapel.
Sponsored by the English department, the event is free and open to the public.
“The reading gives us a wonderful opportunity to hear these bold and innovative poets, who are not only creating challenging new poetry, but editing important journals of poetry in Wales and England,” says Lee Upton, professor of English and the first Lafayette faculty member to hold the title of writer-in-residence.
Before the reading, both poets will visit the Modern and Contemporary Poetry course taught by Upton.
A resident of south Wales, Minhinnick has published eight volumes of poetry, including The Adulterer’s Tongue: Translations of Contemporary Welsh Poetry (2003) and After the Hurricane (2002), both from Carcanet. He also has published collections of essays, including Badlands by Seren Books in 1996, and Watching the Fire Eater, named Welsh Book of the Year in 1993. A new collection will be published next year, dealing partly with his travels in Iraq.
Minhinnick wrote the inaugural story for Atlantic Monthly’s Unbound Fiction series in 1999. His 1995 book, Cuckoo, published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press, was nominated for an Anthony Award as best first novel. He earned the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem, a supplemental award and a second prize at the Bridport Arts Festival, a Lichfield Prize, the Buzzwords Short Story Prize, and the Buzzwords Poetry Prize. He was runner-up in 1998 for the Rhys Davies Memorial Prize. He is a consultant to the Sustainable Wales environmental group.
Minhinnick has performed his poetry throughout the United Kingdom and in Argentina, Canada, and several European countries. He is working with Dylan Thomas’ publisher, New Directions, to mark the 50th anniversary of Thomas’ death.
A native of France who also grew up in Wales, Petit explored family relationships in her second poetry collection, The Zoo Father (Seren 2001), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and earned an Arts Council of England Writers’ Award and a New London Writers’ Award. Petit was shortlisted for a Forward Single Poem Prize in 2000. Her first collection, Heart of a Deer (Enitharmon), appeared in 1998. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, has travelled in the Venezuelan Amazon, and is a contributing editor of Rattapallax.
“This is a wonderful and red-raw collection that captures pain, love and loss,” states The Independent newspaper about The Zoo Father.
“Our eyes are opened to the abundance and colour of the world, and that world seems remade as a life-giving habitat for the imagination,” adds PBS Bulletin. “This makes The Zoo Father an unusual and powerful book indeed.”
Les Murray, Australia’s leading poet and recipient of the T.S. Eliot Award and other prizes, declares, “Pascale Petit is among five or six of the very best current poets of the United Kingdom.
“My poetry is a poetry of extremes,” says Petit. “I’ve never been one for lukewarmth. Tension too – nothing relaxed about the homes I describe. I hope tension creates drama, that I create dramatic tension, that I somehow transform uncomfortable tension into highly charged art. Isn’t a lot of human experience unbearable? I find art is a wonderful release from that.”