Cambridgeshire

CB2 / CB1 restaurant café - Internet, Live Music, ­ Poetry, ­Art, Cinema & Wireless Internet

For more information visit the CB2 website

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The Poetry School present...

...two workshops from Poets John Greening and Annie Freud, offering a day each of poetry writing games, discussion and close reading. Both workshops are flexible enough to give established writers a crop of good new ideas, and to provide beginners with the confidence they need to get going.

Poems that Sing

Tutor: John Greening

Venue: Michaelhouse, Trinity Street, Cambridge CB2 1SU

Date: Saturday 28 March

Time: 10.30am-4.30pm

Fee: £45 (£35 concs)

How do you ensure that your poetry is not just ‘chopped up prose’? By attending to the sound it makes - if a poem doesn’t sing, why should anyone listen to it, how can anyone remember it? Using exercises that draw on the most enduring methods of the great poets, and on close reading and imitation, this intensive writing (and listening) workshop should prove a veritable singing school.

Stolen Poetry

Tutor: Annie Freud

Venue: Michaelhouse, Trinity Street, Cambridge CB2 1SU

Date: Saturday 16 May

Time: 10.30am-4.30pm

Fee: £45 (£35 concs)

‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal’ (T S Eliot). Bring to this workshop five from the following: poems, playscripts, letters, newspaper articles, novels, psalms, prayers, religious texts, technical and reference material, official documents; and experiment with the transformative effect that comes from using stolen material in your poetry. Lots of reading of light-fingered poets to inspire you too.

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Twenty-five years of Dedalus: The Arabian Nightmare to The Father of Locks

Dedalus began publishing at the end of 1983 with three ‘first’ novels, one of which was The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin. Set in medieval Cairo it was inspired by The One Thousand and One Nights. Although not an instant success The Arabian Nightmare went on to find world-wide fame. It has been translated into 18 languages, recently optioned to a major European film production company and is considered by many critics as one of the greatest novels of its period. It remains our most successful book.

Other unusual and inventive novels followed as we created our own genre, distorted reality, for instance Pfitz by Andrew Crumey, Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf by David Madsen, Bad to the Bone by James Waddington and Dragon’s Eye by Andy Oakes, but it is still The Arabian Nightmare by which we judge all our new titles

We have waited twenty-five years to find a worthy successor and we now have. The Father of Locks by Andrew Killeen will do for ninth century Baghdad what Robert Irwin did for medieval Cairo. Our second One Thousand and One Nights novel, like The Arabian Nightmare is witty, erudite, erotic, exciting and gripping. It will take the reader on a journey that he or she will never want to forget.

The Father of Locks heralds a brilliant beginning for Dedalus’s twenty-sixth year as a publisher. It shows our commitment to finding the new voices of the future, the authors who truly are different from the crowd. Another ‘first’ novel follows in February, Jeremy Weingard’s Made in Yaroslavl, followed in March by Mappamundi, Christopher Harris’s fourth novel.

If these three books, the first books of our twenty-sixth year as a publisher, can do as well as our first list, two of them will still be in print when Dedalus begins its fiftieth year as a publisher.