The Poetic Image
Sarah Gomes Harris covered the Hastings Bookshop Poetry Festival for HIP earlier this autumn. Here are some of her sketches of those attending.
I sketched poets sporadically between chunky intervals. The mood was not one of overworking: audience and poets shared thoughts and take away pizzas on the curb outside Rustico. The event had the air of an away day, and I left topped up and healed by all these people who take the time to observe and present their meaning. There was no rush on any poet, but I will be wandering back to Hastings Bookshop on pay day.
Stephen Watts, poet and translator, has published seven books of poetry, most recently Twenty Four Hours. His work is like river flow, and you feel almost like a child running along a bankside to keep up with them.
James Goodwin’s debut Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip is published by the87press.
His work had this intense streaming quality, but a deeply packed language each sentence
feeding the next like an infinite mirror room. At least this is how it felt two beers in.
Londoner Eve Esfandiari-Denney draws on her Iranian/Roma roots, weaving Persia into her experiences of cancer and ‘cosy’ relationship with morphine: “I told my mother let them / push the needle in. That armada / of cancers inside her, building one more / hard yellow mountain. I hoped every 4am”.
Hastings and Cambridge-based Lewis Todd’s work features aquatics centre observations with musings on the Bulgarian war. At times feeling like Morse codes from different worlds sneaking by each other, with moments of stand-up comedy.
Jen Calleja is a Hastings British/Maltese writer who translates German. Her collection of poems –
I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For, takes us on travels in the apprehensive liminal spaces of her work… all held together by a taut but warming wit.
Leicester’s JJ Lucyszyn’s How do we live here? As obvious as swans. felt like a perfect end.
It touched on something so fundamental, almost like you never needed to read anything else.
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