Maggie, Bill, Sarah and Barry first read together at a Roundabout Nights event which took place at a Colony exhibition at The Halpern Gallery in October 2018. This reading was a huge success and the four poets agreed to read together again. In 2023, as part of the Rainham Poetry Festival, in association with Medway River Lit, Maggie, Bill, Sarah and Barry are reuniting for a reading. To commemorate this event The Choir Press in conjunction with Beckit Books is proud to publish a book containing a sample of poetry from each of these four outstanding poets.
Maggie Harris; The Word; Anansi Hit Broadstairs; Migrant Woman Bodysong;
Barbados; Chillenden; Paradise Fruit; Extract from Havana; The Lake Hotel,
Killarney; Goa; Island; Lake Christmas; Cwmpengraig, Place of Stones; The
Strip, Albufeira; Fox; Wellington Crescent, Ramsgate, ; Bill Lewis; Moon
Hare; Alhambra; Apple Pickers, ; Estragon and Vladimir; Jasper Summer;
Planes; Marginalia; The Pre-History of Genetic Engineering; Coyote Poem:
Grand Theft Auto; The Gender of Time is Black; Flags; Poem for Cristina
Hoyos; I wish I were dust on your shoes; Inca Moonshot; A War of Flowers;
Sarah Hehir; Glass Half; Przemysl Train Station; Iris Is Not A Cross Country
Runner; Old Speckled Hen; The U-Boat And The Whale; Cider Season; Wrecking
Season; And This Is Not The End Of You; Going Outside In The Middle Of The
Night; The Weight of Antony; I Stand: Useless Stranger; When No Storm Comes;
Cove Point; For My Valentine; Barry Fentiman Hall; Adventures in Sound;
England Forgets; England, My Dandelion Heart; Fruit Picking; The Road To
Domestos; Incident Suite; A Lay Bye For Lucid Dreamers; The Elder On The ;
Under Speeton Cliffs; The Woman Who Talked To Herself;
Deconstructed/Reconstructed; Rainsnow; Acknowledgements
Maggie Harris was born in Guyana and lives in the UK. She has published ten books of poetry, prose and a memoir, Kiskadee Girl. Awards include The Guyana Prize for Literature, The Commonwealth Short Story Prize and The Wales Poetry Award. Bill Lewis was one of the six Medway Poets, a founder member of The Stuckists, and winner of the 2012 Literature Award from the Medway Culture and Design Award. He is a former Writer in Residence at the Brighton Festival. He has performed his poetry in the USA, Nicaragua, Germany, France and in his native UK. His work has been broadcast on TV and Radio including Radio Faribundo Marti in El Salvador, BBC 2, Radio Alice Springs and in the USA. His work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish and French. Sarah Hehir is a poet and playwright from the industrial north. Her plays explore and expose abuse of power, shifting the control of the narrative away from authority and giving voice to marginalised individuals and communities. Her poems are about love, life and death. Since winning the inaugural BBC Writers Prize in 2013, she has written for stage, radio, TV and film. Barry Fentiman Hall is a Medway based poet from the north. He has been published across a diverse range of journals in the UK, Ireland, and North America, including Crack The Spine, Anti-Heroin Chic, International Times, Lit Quarterly (Canada), Ink Sweat & Tears, The Cormorant, Dreich, The Journal, Seaside Gothic, Marble, and Picaroon. His three collections The Unbearable Sheerness Of Being, England, My Dandelion Heart, and Sketches are all available from Wordsmithery. As part of Wordsmithery he is currently the editor of Confluence Magazine, and the co-director of both Rainham Poetry Festival and Medway River Lit.
