The Poetry of Trees: reading with Katharine Towers
SUNDAY 21st May
National Trust Longshaw Estate – Moorland Discovery Centre, S11 7TZ
16:30 – 17:00
PAYF
Event Description
Culminating a day of tree-themed poetry activities, Katharine Towers will read from her latest collection, Oak.
Oaks are some of our oldest companions, and have been rooted in human imagination and language for millennia. Katharine Towers’ new sequence of poems accompanies the oak from acorn to grave, and into its afterlife; playful, lyric and lucid, Oak is also shot through with an ecocritical awareness that renders it utterly contemporary. Towers’ precise eye and gift for sharp comparison allows us to enter into the life of the tree, and the birds and insects and plants it hosts.
Bus information from Sheffield:
272 from Sheffield Interchange or Hunter’s Bar to Fox House.
Departing Sheffield Interchange at 15:50 / Hunter’s Bar 16:03, arriving Fox House 16:18.
Returning to Sheffield at 17:34, 18:19 (from Fox House).
Full timetable: Travel South Yorkshire
Katharine Towers lives in the Peak District and has published three collections with Picador. Oak (2021) is a book-length poem about the life of an oak tree and was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Guardian. The Floating Man (2010) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and The Remedies (2016) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. A pamphlet, The Violin Forest, was published by HappenStance in 2019 and a new pamphlet exploring the life and work of the twentieth-century English composer Gerald Finzi is to be published in July 2023 by The Maker’s Press.
In person only, wheelchair accessible.
Click here for details of the family-friendly poetry walk that Katharine Towers will lead from the Moorland Discovery Centre earlier in the day (1.30pm start).
Click here to return to the main festival programme.