THE BATH LAUNCH OF TIM LIARDET’S FIFTH COLLECTION OF POETRY THE BLOOD CHOIR
Tim Liardet, Senior Lecturer in Creative Studies at Bath Spa University,
will be launching his fifth collection of poetry—The Blood Choir—at the Bath
Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, Queen Square, Bath, on Thursday
June 8, doors open at 8 pm, tickets at door £5.00 (£3.00 conc). An evening
of Wine and Poetry.
All thirty eight of these award-winning poems grew out of the year Tim
Liardet spent teaching at the second largest Young Offenders’ prison in
Europe. Shunning easy postures, Liardet understands that liberal consensus
is not enough. We are all of us implicated in the prisoner’s experience:
this is the threat he poses. For anyone wanting to take a long hard look at
the problem of the prisons in 2006 this is an essential book. Fear —‘a
spider of hair treading the nape’— is the presiding emotion; and it is fear
that gives these poems their edge. The world behind the razor wire is
explored, envisaged and re-envisaged as Liardet adapts to an atmospheric
pressure that buckles all assumptions. The result is an extraordinary
sequence of poems which visits the violence of the collective unconscious
and culminates in the Russian serial killer Chikatilo’s haunting entreaty to
the forces that have condemned him.
Tim Liardet was born in London, of Huguenot descent. Some of these poems
were a winner of the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition and, as a
collection-in-progress, won an Arts Council England Writers’ Award, both in
2003. His highly acclaimed previous collection To the God of Rain was a
Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2003.
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