This week in our poetry news round up we take a look at the Ledbury Poetry Festival, which is currently in full swing, and the posthumous collection of last poems from the Pulitzer Prize winner Franz Wright.
Ledbury Poetry Festival Underway
The Ledbury Poetry Festival, one of the largest and longest-running celebrations of poetry in the UK, is currently taking place in the Herefordshire market town. This year’s festival began on 26th June and will run for ten days, coming to a close on Sunday 5th July with the Ledbury Celebration, the town’s food, drink, music and poetry event held in St Katherine’s Square.
As always, the programme brings together poets from all over the world for a packed schedule of readings, debates, workshops, exhibitions, slams and even poetry walks through the surrounding hills. Among this year’s highlights is a joint reading from Tishani Doshi and Anthony Joseph. Doshi will be reading from Egrets, While War, her fifth collection, published by Bloodaxe Books, which offers a lyrical meditation on war, survival, ancestral memory and environmental loss. Joseph, meanwhile, will share work from Haunting the Black Air, his musically charged new Bloomsbury collection that moves across cities, cultures and emotions.
Fans of Sylvia Plath are also well catered for this year. The festival is hosting a special event that brings together leading Plath scholars, including Jo Gill, alongside the poet Stephanie Sy-Quia, to explore the enduring power and complexity of Plath’s work in the light of a landmark new edition of her poetry.
Alongside the festival itself, the annual Ledbury Poetry Competition is now open for entries. This year’s judge is Andrew McMillan, whose debut collection remains the only book of poetry ever to have won the Guardian First Book Award. The winner of the competition will receive £1,000 in cash together with a week-long poetry course with the creative writing charity Arvon, with £500 and £250 going to second and third place respectively. The three winners will also be invited to perform their work at next year’s festival. Poets have until 27th July to enter.
Final Poems of Franz Wright Published
Photo: © Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright
This month sees the publication of Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments, a posthumous collection from the American poet Franz Wright, more than a decade after his death.
Wright, who died in 2015 at the age of 62 following a battle with lung cancer, was one of the most distinctive voices in American poetry. Born in Vienna in 1953, he was the son of the poet James Wright, and the two hold the unique distinction of being the only father and son ever to have won the Pulitzer Prize in the same category. James received his in 1972, whilst Franz was awarded the honour in 2004 for his collection Walking to Martha’s Vineyard.
The new collection, published by Knopf, gathers together the last poems and fragments that Wright was working on at the end of his life. According to the accompanying notes, many of the pieces were written both for and with his wife, the translator Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, and the book has been described as an unbearably beautiful farewell from a poet whose work so often moved between darkness, faith and moments of hard-won grace.
Axe in Blossom arrives as part of a notably strong month for new poetry. July also brings Tree of Knowledge, the latest collection from Victoria Chang, the acclaimed author of Obit. The new book, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pairs poems with historical photographs that Chang has hand-stitched with red thread, and centres on a long poem addressing the expulsion of Chinese residents from Eureka, California, in the nineteenth century. New titles from Christian Wiman and Phillip B. Williams round out an impressive month for readers of contemporary poetry.
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