Three Poets from Mica Press

Book Launch

6.30pm Friday 13th October

Wivenhoe Bookshop

Join us for this spoken word extravaganza to mark the launch of Mica Press’s Autumn Titles. Poets Angela Livingstone and Margaret Eddershaw will be reading from their work, and Julian Flanagan will be represented in a a video link.

About the Books

Certain Roses: Poems 1980 – 2010

Angela Livingstone

This is the first collection of her own poems by the celebrated translator Angela Livingstone. The subjects are, in her own words: poetry, language, people, death, places, nature and things. The publisher also discerned love and faith.

Angela studied Russian and German at Cambridge, taught literature, mainly Russian, at the University of Essex from 1966 to 1997 and is now retired. She has lived in Colchester for 51 years.

Main previous publications: Pasternak (critical articles) – in collaboration with Donald Davie, Macmillan, London, 1969.  Lou Andreas-Salomé, Her Life and Writings, Gordon Fraser, London, 1984.

Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (”Landmarks of World Literature’),C.U.P., 1989. Art in the Light of Conscience (translation of eight essays on poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva). Bloodaxe Books, 2010.

The Ratcatcher, A Lyrical Satire (translation of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem of 2000 lines). Angel Books, London, 1999.

Poems from Chevengur (transposition into English verse of 50 passages of Andrei

Platonov’s prose), Clacton, 2004.

The Marsh of Gold. Pasternak’s Writings on Inspiration and Creation. Academic Studies

Press, Boston, 2008.

Phaedra (translation of Tsvetaeva’s drama in verse, and of two long poems.) Angel

Books, 2012. (Awarded the Rossica Prizein 2014.)

Cooking with Cancer

Julian Flanagan

Cooking with Cancer is poetry served up in the form of a menu: Starters, Main Course,

Afters, Digestif.

“Flecked with arresting imagery, Cooking with Cancer looks, and looks again. Matter-of-factly, it refuses to flinch.” – Mario Petrucci.

This poetic chronicle, spiked with humour, leads the reader through an unpredictable odyssey as cancer interrupts life and life interrupts cancer, as loyalty and belief are tested, and as the author is ambushed by the idiosyncrasies and changing ages of love.

Julian Flanagan was born in Peru in 1962, raised in India, Cheshire and Dubai, and educated at Stonyhurst and LSE. After 20 years as an advertising copywriter, he became a journalist.

His interviews and features have appeared in The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The FT Weekend, FT Magazine, Time Out, The Independent on Sunday and economist.com.

Over the last 25 years his poetry has been published in magazines such as Ambit, Envoi, Iota, Lighthouse, The Manchester Review, The Reader, Rialto, Seam and The Spectator. He lives in London with his wife and three children.

Is That All There Is?

Margaret Eddershaw

Poetry that lets us experience ‘the round Earth’s imagined corners’ in the daily renewed light of a mind as alive to beauty as to suffering, bringing distant lives closer and reaching deftly, deeply, into the heart of things.

Margaret Eddershaw writes:

Between the ages of 5 and 50, I pursued my passion for theatrical performance.

Most of the poetry I enjoyed then was Shakespeare, though I also read Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes. I wrote plays but not poems…

Following the murder of my sister in 1995, I began writing poems to and about her – a cliché, I know, but it was a good part of my grieving process. I then continued to develop an interest in  writing poetry, devouring the work of many contemporary poets, as a way of learning a new  craft.

Inevitably, perhaps, my theatre background began to influence my poems, so that many of them comment on or are ‘in the voices’ of people (characters) that I have encountered.

Reviews of Margaret Eddershaw’s book:

Catching Light, (Poetry Space 2013):

‘Margaret lives abroad and has travelled extensively, and she has focused her acute powers of observation to write poems bothmoving and funny in turns…. No matter where her poems are set, what shines through in each one is a strongly-held sense of our common humanity, and an awareness of the beauty of our shared world.’

– Jo Waterworth

‘Margaret Eddershaw’s collection is a tourde- force, multi-faceted and generous, andrefreshingly original in her choice of image and juxtapositions. Stylistically adventurous, Eddershaw takes us on journeys into other cultures, other voices, in poems resonant with feeling.’

– Katherine Gallagher