Compass Lines #2

We're in Belfast for Compass Lines #2, where I'll be in conversation with Miriam Gamble and Nerys Williams, and where the poets will present their collaboration City of Two Suns, specially commissioned for the event and published that day by the Irish Writers Centre. In addition, earlier in the day they will deliver a joint writing workshop in the Ulster Museum to a group composed of participants in various existing writing classes in Belfast.

Compass Lines is a writers� exchange project aiming to establish links between writers and communities in the North and South of Ireland, while additionally examining relationships between the East and West of these islands, through workshops, public discussions, and the commissioning of new collaborative writing.

Developed by poet, editor and curator Christodoulos Makris in collaboration with the Irish Writers Centre as producing organisation, and with the participation of the Crescent Arts Centre as partner venue.


Compass Lines #2
Miriam Gamble & Nerys Williams
Wednesday 11 May 2016, Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast
7.30pm, entry via Eventbrite �8/�6 or on the door �10/�8

Miriam Gamble is from Belfast, but now lives in Edinburgh. She is a graduate of both Oxford and Queens University Belfast and in 2007 she won an Eric Gregory Award for her pamphlet with Tall-lighthouse entitled This Man�s Town. Her first full-length collection, The Squirrels are Dead (2010) won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2011, and Pirate Music followed in 2014, both of which are published by Bloodaxe.

Originally from West Wales, Nerys Williams lectures in American Literature at University College, Dublin and is a Fulbright Alumnus of UC Berkeley. She has published poems and essays widely and is the author of A Guide to Contemporary Poetry (Edinburgh UP, 2011) and a study of contemporary American poetics, Reading Error (Peter Lang, 2007). Nerys�s first volume, Sound Archive (Seren, 2011), was shortlisted for the Felix Denis (Forward) prize and won the Rupert and Eithne Strong first volume prize in 2012. She is the current holder of the Poetry Ireland Ted McNulty Poetry Prize.

gorse No. 5

Issue 5 of gorse was published at the end of March, ushering in the second phase of the journal: publication frequency is now up to three times a year (March, July, November) with the page count set at 200 pages. The new single issue price is �13.00.

�It�s certainly a work of great beauty even before you open it. After only four issues it�s become one of the most regarded journals around.� � Daniel McCabe, Magalleria

In this issue I'm proud and excited to be publishing brand new poetry from SJ Fowler ('Prism' - from a sequence celebrating Edward Snowden), Linda Kemp (four poems), Alan Jude Moore ('Gabriel'), Doireann N� Ghr�ofa (two poems), and James Wilkes (the sequence 'Sputniks').

Susan Tomaselli's editorial 'The Geometry Blinked Ruin Unimaginable' introduces the themes running through the issue, discussing among much else Andy Warhol's 'Death and Disaster' series, Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, Marinetti and The Futurist Manifesto, and Picasso's 'Guernica'.

gorse No. 5 also includes essays by Diarmuid Hester, Darragh McCausland, Nathan Hugh O�Donnell and Benjamin Robinson; fiction by Will Ashon, Maria Fusco, Olivia Heal, D Joyce-Ahearne, Helen McClory, Simon Okotie and Eimear Ryan; interviews with Owen Hatherley by Robert Barry and with Sarah Pierce by Claire Potter; and aphorisms by Susana Medina, translated by Jonathan Dunne.

You can buy gorse No. 5 individually from the website or you can purchase a subscription. Back issues (except No. 1) are also available from the gorse shop. In addition, the journal is stocked in selected bookshops.

Please join us in celebrating the launch of gorse no. 5 in The Liquor Rooms (5 Wellington Quay, Dublin 2) on Wednesday 20 April with readings by D Joyce-Ahearne, Darragh McCausland, Alan Jude Moore, Nathan Hugh O�Donnell, and Eimear Ryan. Start time is 7.30pm and admission is free.