In association with the Cheltenham Poetry Festival

On the Roman Hill: a poetry walk exploring Ivor Gurney's Crickley Hill
2pm Wednesday 24th April (free)
Leader: Eleanor Rawling (author of Ivor Gurney's Gloucestershire;exploring poetry and place)

Meet at the Crickley Hill Country Park lower car park (GR 929164) located near the Air Balloon junction. Note this is a pay and display car park.
Walk length about 2 miles, with the option of an extra mile if the group wishes. The walk will leave promptly at 2pm; finish about 4.15pm. Tea/coffee can be obtained afterwards at the Air Balloon public house if desired.

Up there on the Roman Hill all was quiet.
Only harebells nodded,
And the pieces of limestone scattered in the spaces white,
Wondered not what I did.

(Quietude, Gurney1925)

Eleanor Rawling will lead a short poetry walk focused on Crickley Hill, Gurney’s high playground and place of retreat. It is one of the places featuring most frequently in the poems, often as ‘the Roman hill’, ...

On Sunday, 28 April at 3:30pm, Liz Berry, winner of the 2012 Poetry London competition,  will be reading at the Oxfam Bookshop in Cheltenham, a key event in this year’s Cheltenham Poetry Festival.  She will be joined by the much praised poet Claire Dyer.

Liz Berry is not only a poet of exceptional talent, but also one of the most amazing performers in the business. Her pamphlet The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls won a rave review from former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion.  But Liz’s stage presence and spell-binding delivery add an extra dimension to her work, as those lucky enough to hear her at the Literature Festival in 2011 will know.  “If you have never heard her read, don’t miss this opportunity!” says Festival co-Director Robin Gilbert. “If you have, you won’t need me to persuade you to do so again.” 

Claire Dyer has been widely published in poetry magazines and her debut collection Eleven Rooms will be published ...

Bernard O’Donoghue, a past winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry and author of many acclaimed collections over the last thirty years, will be reading at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival at 3:30pm on Saturday, 27 April at Copa in Regent Street. 

Farmers Cross.  No, not bovine TB or the Common Agricultural Policy or even the weather, but a village in Co. Cork and the title of O’Donoghue’s most recent collection.  He is an Irishman who has lived most of his life in England. Displacement - immigrants, refugees, exiles - feature strongly in his most recent work, echoing his own condition as an emigré.  Memory is a key not for nostalgia, but for a deeply humane, yet understated, sense of unease. O’Donoghue writes about ordinary things in a way that is far from ordinary. His Selected Poems were published by Faber in 2008.  For many years, he has taught English literature at Oxford University, currently at Wadham College. Ian Hislop of Private ...

Ivor Gurney events at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival: 4:30pm, 21 April at Copa, Cheltenham; guided walk on Crickley Hill, 2pm, 24 April

On Sunday, 21 April at 4:30pm in Copa in Regent Street, the Cheltenham Poetry Festival will be celebrating the life and work of Ivor Gurney, one of Gloucestershire’s finest poets and composers, at an event sponsored by Harrison Clark. 

Not just a poet from Gloucestershire, but the poet of Gloucestershire: the Severn, the Cotswold hills (Crickley, Birdlip, Cooper’s), Maismore, Framilode, the City of Gloucester itself - all were at the very heart of the man and of his poetry.

At the event on 21 April, there will be a showing of the highly acclaimed film by Diana Taylor and Anthea Page, Severn and Somme - The Life of Ivor Gurney, followed by a reading by local Gloucestershire poets of their poems about, or inspired by, Gurney. Tickets are already selling fast. Get yours on line at www.cheltenhamtownhall.org.uk, by phone (0844 576 2210) ...

Joining Dan Holloway on Wednesday, 24 April at 8:45pm at the Strand will be electric performance poets James Webster, contributing editor of Sabotage Reviews, and Salford-born Words Escape Me, winner of the Amnesty International Poetry Slam in 2012. 

James, who loves words and socialism in equal measure, is well known on the Slam circuit from London to the Midlands and is probably the only poet in the UK who will text poetry directly to your mobile for free if you e-mail him your name and number to [email protected] James will be launching his one-man show '50 Shades of Webster', which "has nothing to do with BDSM, but everything to do with time-travel and self discovery". It's a show about the magic in the future and in the past, about friends, enemies and confronting the bits of yourself you'd rather pretend didn't exist.

Words Escape Me is the stage name of Jonathan Barrington, whose witty and incisive poems are winning a fast-growing following in the North-West -  ...