An evening of poetry reading and discussion with Nisha Ramayya

7pm, Thursday 18th July, Gloucester Road Books

Publisher, Granta Books, describe the dynamic collection as follows: ‘Fantasia hazards a listening walk through seashells, telecommunication networks, and cosmic vibrations, to learn something new about how we sound. Alice Coltrane’s experiments in jazz and spiritual community guide these poems that hum and glitch, that leap across space-time, landing in and reflecting the discordant music of life on earth.”

It’s been so exciting to launch our series of poetry events here this year, our readings & talks from Isabel Galleymore and Sam Riviere have both been completely brilliant, and I honestly cannot wait for this one. I love Alice Coltrane’s music, but I don’t think that’s in any way a prerequisite to come and enjoy hearing Nisha Ramayya read & discuss this collection.

Reviews

‘An exploration of exploration… Full of insight, energy, wit and curiosity… These pieces have all the rigour, mischief, candour and assured vulnerability of expert improvisation. To read Nisha Ramayya is excitement itself.’ Eley Williams

‘Extraordinary… Nisha Ramayya is a poet who listens carefully to everything, allowing us to concentrate on the listener and heed what she tells us is heard… There are books of poetry to enjoy, but there are other books where poems are a map to living in this world, and this book is one of the best guides.’ CAConrad

‘Oh! Mythic and mattering, melodious stuff… I have travelled, and my language won’t be the same again; enchanted, relearned, remembered. Nisha Ramayya is cosmic, a one-of-a-kind, a once-in-a-generation artistic genius.’ Holly Pester

‘A deeply luminous, strange, beautiful and real collection.’ Bhanu Kapil

‘Nisha Ramayya’s Fantasia not simply a quotidian basket of dice, but circulatory aphasia that whirls by endemic generation. A drone of blazing casting lingual carats descending from poetic glow blending as carats from the Milky Way, reddish via poetic incineration thus a dazzling poetic crown via seepage into higher expanse being audic circulation by trance.’ Will Alexander

The book that made a sudden and significant difference to my confidence in approaching poetry was this wonderful anthology, The Process of Poetry, edited by Rosanna McGlone and published by Fly on the Wall Press. It’s a collection of poetry from a broad range of different contemporary poets. For each poet the book presents first an early draft of a poem, followed immediately by the final version, and then an interview between the poet and the editor. It provides the most extraordinary insight into these writers’ respective processes, and in my own experience it also just pulled subtly back the veil that had been obscuring my attempts to find a way into poetry as a whole. It’s an incredibly generous thing for these poets to do, to allow readers to peek inside their workings; to see how the sausage is made! I’m hugely grateful to this book for opening up a new reading world to me. If you think it’s a world you might wish to inhabit yourself, then I really cannot recommend it highly enough.

-Tom