Dawn Gorman believes poetry should be everywhere - puts it on beermats, uses it to
work with people with memory loss, facilitates writing workshops, organises poetry
events and runs international poetry competitions. She is widely published, and has
performed in New York, Paris, London - and lots of smaller places in between.

“Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket;
you put your life into it and make something out of that.” Mary Oliver

Sue Boyle

Guest Poet: Sue Boyle

Sue Boyle and Miranda Pender will be bringing a special production of Sue's Victorian love story The Letters from Mexico, which has already staged as a theatre production in Taunton and launched with artwork by Jude Wisdom at the Teignmouth Festival of Poetry. Slides based on the works of Frederick Lord Leighton and Henri 'Le Douanier Rousseau' and a new edition of The Letters created for this occasion will complete the show.

Maggie Harris

Guest Poet: Maggie Harris

Maggie Harris is a Guyana-born writer from Kent living in Wales. Her poetry is a blend of English lyricism and Caribbean Creole; she has twice won the Guyana Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2014. Her poem Lit by Fire was commissioned to represent Kent by BBC Radio for National Poetry Day 2016. She has performed alongside Jean Binta Breeze and John Agard. Previous books include Sixty Years of Loving, (poetry) Cane Arrow Press, and Writing on Water, (stories) published by Seren. Her latest is On Watching a Lemon Sail the Sea, the title poem of which was a winner in the Welsh International Poetry Competition.

26th September 2019, The Swan Hotel, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire BA15 1LN

What a delicious evening's poetry we were treated to at our September Words & Ears. Courtesy of both guest poets and open mic performers, we were whisked away to many exotic worlds - Guyana, Mexico, Uganda, India, South Africa... before coming back to a lost bear on the streets of Bath. Maggie Harris's beautiful, lyrical poetry journeyed through England, Wales and Guyana with a lemon, banana tree and Frida Kahlo among our guides, while Sue Boyle and musician Miranda Pender's richly evocative production of The Letter's From Mexico, complete with gorgeous slides, gave us two yearning Victorian hearts trapped by time and circumstance - a love story that reached for remembered longings in us all, I'm sure. Sue and Miranda devised this version of this wonderful sonnet sequence especially for us, and it was an absolute treat, thank you both. And thanks, too, to our superb open mic-ers, Ruth Sharman, Verona Bass, Caroline Heaton, Tom Forrest, Peter O'Grady, Eileen Cameron, Paul Brokensha, Brian Reid and Stephen Payne.