Our Tuesday meeting at the Camden Centre on November 19 welcomes 2 poets with first collections under their belts: Dick Jones and Hilda Sheehan. This should prove to be a lively evening, with 2 very contrasting voices. We also welcome poems from the floor in our sessions and interval drinks are provided. Come along and join us!
About the writers: Hilda Sheehan
Hilda Sheehan
Hilda Sheehan is a writer and arts events organiser based in Swindon. She was born in 1967 in High Wycombe and grew up in Leyland, Lancashire. She studied English Literature and Creative Writing at the Open University. She has been a psychiatric nurse and Montessori teacher and is now co-editor of Domestic Cherry magazine with Michael Scott, She also works for Swindon Artswords (Literature Development) and the Swindon Festival of Poetry. Her poetry has been published in The Rialto, Poetry Salzburg Review, Tears in the Fence, The Interpreter’s House, Artemis Poetry, National Poetry Society Website (Commendation NPC 2000), The New Writer, South, BBC website, Commonhead, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Kim Moore’s Sunday Poem, Josephine Corcoran’s And Other Poems, Ariadne’s Thread, Incandescent.
Hilda won a Poetry Can South West Poetry Award in October 2013 for her work in poetry development in the south west.
Her first collection of poetry, The Night My Sister Went to Hollywood, offers poems on love, exhaustion, classic movies, supermarket shopping and seals in the bathtub.
“A joyful, freewheeling poetry that showcases a surreal wit worn with a lightness that can only be achieved through a firm grip on her craft and a sure habitation of her magically real neighbourhood. This is a collection that licks its hanky and scrubs the muck from your chops.” Myra Schneider
Dick Jones
Initially wooed by the First World War poets and then seduced by the Beats, Dick Jones has been exploring the vast territories in between since the age of 15.
Dick’s work has been published in a number of magazines, print and online, including Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Ireland Review, Qarrtsiluni, Westwords, Mipoesias, Three Candles, Other Poetry, Rattlesnake and Ouroboros Review, and in several print anthologies, including Sing Freedom! (Amnesty International), Brilliant Coroners (Phoenicia Publishing), and Words of Power (qarrtsiluni/Phoenicia). His chapbook, Wavelengths, was a finalist in the 2009 qarrtsiluni chapbook contest, and he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2010 for his poem, “Sea of Stars.”
In addition to thirty-five years of teaching drama in progressive schools, Dick Jones has been an avid musician all his life, playing bass guitar in rock, blues, and folk bands. He lives outside London with his wife and children, and blogs at Dick Jones’ Patteran Pages.
Dick Jones’ first book-length collection, Ancient Lights, published in 2012, contains 59 poems selected from the years between 1986 and 2012. Named for the autobiographical poems which begin the book and recall the author’s birth during WWII and his early memories, “Ancient Lights” is both a window into the poet’s own world, and one through which we are invited to look at our own lives and relationships.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 