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

Caroline Heaton

Guest Poet: Caroline Heaton

Caroline Heaton is a Bath-based poet, whose work has appeared in magazines and anthologies, most recently in The Listening Walk.
She is a member of the Bath Poetry Cafe and Bear Flat Artists and enjoys collaborations with artists in different media. In 2015, classical composer Malcolm Hill set her poems to music for concerts exploring the legacy of the Battle of Agincourt and the creation of Magna Carta.
Her first pamphlet, The Bone-house (Bear Flat Press/PhotoBath), arose from a collaboration with photographer Carlos Ordonez. Caroline regularly performs her work at the Bath Literature Festival and venues in the South West.

Martin Malone

Guest Poet: Martin Malone

Martin Malone lives in north-east Scotland. He has published two poetry collections: The Waiting Hillside (Templar, 2011) and Cur (Shoestring, 2015). His Great War-related third collection, The Unreturning is forthcoming. An Associate Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at Aberdeen University, he recently completed a PhD in poetry at Sheffield University and contributes two chapters to the upcoming Mars and Minerva: The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War - Volume 1: Australasia, the British Isles, and the United States.

31st March 2016, The Swan Hotel, 1 Church Street, Bradford on Avon, BA15 1LN

It's been going on for years, the peculiar flow of synchronicity at Words & Ears, and Thursday's event was no exception, with work from our two guest poets and the hugely talented roomful of open mic-ers centring on two key issues - sex and death.

Martin Malone got us off to a good start on the former topic, with Cur, the title poem of his collection published by Shoestring last year, then on to more from his pamphlet Prodigals, just out from Middlesbrough-based The Black Light Engine Room. There were moving poems about shaving his mother's head when she was being treated for cancer, and about his father, the "unknown younger man" who "came back" in his time of grace between heart attacks. If further evidence of virtuosity were needed, we switched, via a quick round of 1970s wrestling, to a darker second half and his newer work: responses to The Great War, including prose poems with ghost echoes of lines from familiar WWI poetry, and all finding new ground away from the trap of the 'troublingly aestheticised' trend in modern WWI poetry.

Bringing with her striking examples of photographic work by her collaborator Carlos Ordonez, Caroline Heaton read from her first pamphlet, The Bone House, including memorable poems based on Ordonez's sequence of images from a disused prison, "where measurement trips/ a man,/ reduces him/ to inhuman/ dimensions." We also visited the complex mediaeval love story of Heloise and Abelard, and from there went, via a small ash tree, to work commissioned by musician Malcolm Hill.

The standard of open mic contributions at Words & Ears rises ever higher, and the roomful of talent on this occasion was tremendous. Thanks to all for their contributions. Stephen Boyce's poem, in French and English versions, about the Paris attacks last November was particularly powerful in its simplicity, but there was humour too - Andy Fawthrop on the subject of extreme tidiness, and Josephine Corcoran on contributors' notes to editors being especially memorable.