Events

Erica Hesketh is a poet and editor, originally from Japan and Denmark. Her poetry has been commissioned by the Royal Festival Hall, Spread the Word, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Exeter University. Her debut collection, In the Lily Room, is published by Nine Arches Press and explores early motherhood. Her pamphlet To an Unknown Receiver: Sonnets & Cascades is forthcoming with Guillemot Press. She is Artistic Director of the Winchester Poetry Festival.

Erica Hesketh’s debut collection In the Lily Room tells a story of early motherhood. It examines a new mother’s journey through mental illness, her relationships with her body, her baby and other people, and the often surreal landscape of mothering, against a backdrop of a changing and uncertain world.

A dreamlike birth sequence full of eels, foxes and floodwater empties onto a London postnatal ward, where reality sets in. Rudderless and anxious, the new mother writes notes to herself, joins support groups and tries medication. She climbs into myth and prayer, nightmare and song, criss-crossing her neighbourhood with a pram, until she starts to feel better. Hesketh’s poems speak of the many things motherhood can mean, the structures it is made to fit inside. Clear-eyed and full of hard-won love, this a story of one of the most common experiences there is, told in a dazzlingly original way.

‘In poems of great skill, daring and beauty, Hesketh somehow contains the leaky mess of new parenthood. This is for all the mothers – mother of stone, mother of ice, mother of fire, mother of dark. A stunning debut: intelligent, tender and unwaveringly true.’ – Clare Pollard  

Catherine Redford’s debut collection, The Way the Water Held Me (The Emma Press), explores the caring, grief, loss, and love experienced by a young widow. A Magma Selected Poet, Catherine’s work has also been published in Under the Radar, Propel, New Welsh Reader, and Lighthouse. She is an editor at Dust Poetry magazine, a Nine Arches Press Dynamo Poet, and a Writing West Midlands Room 204 Writer.

While newly married, with the couple expecting their first child, Catherine Redford’s wife was tragically diagnosed with a terminal illness. The Way the Water Held Me is a mesmeric plunge into the caring, grief, loss and love experienced by a young widow.

Across poems of heartbreak and honesty, memory and mourning – and through unlikely companionship with a widowed Mary Shelley – Catherine Redford’s debut collection is visceral, profound and alive with what it is to be human, to have lost and to find ways to continue to love.

“Essential, transformative reading” – Fiona Benson 

We look forward to seeing you.

Catherine & Claire