Belfast poet Rosemary Jenkinson launches her new collection 'Let Freedom Fall Upon You' in a talk with poet Damian Smyth at The Harrison.
Rosemary Jenkinson is at The Harrison on Sunday 25 October, where she'll be launching her new collection, Let Freedom Fall Upon You. It's not a reading in the usual sense; she'll be in conversation with the poet Damian Smyth, so you'll hear her talking through the work rather than just reciting it. The talk is part of the Belfast International Arts Festival, and it runs for an hour starting at 2:00pm.
Jenkinson is a Belfast poet, fiction writer, playwright and essayist. Her first collection, Sandy Row Riots, was highly commended in the Forward Prizes, and Let Freedom Fall Upon You follows it. The new poems cover a fair bit of ground: the unmapped spaces of modern love, epiphanies in the natural world, the need for revolution and the burial of troubled history in bogland. While it's set mainly in Northern Ireland, it looks globally too, with the USA, Ukraine, the Middle East and the Paris Olympics and Paralympics all making an appearance.
There's a bit of a track record to her work that's worth knowing. The Irish Times has praised her fiction for "an elegant wit, terrific characterization and an absolute sense of her own particular Belfast", and Smyth himself has singled out her poetry for "a lyric temperament and a political wit to be reckoned with". Having them both on stage together should give you a good sense of how the new collection sits.
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The venue is The Harrison, a Victorian building on the Malone Road in South Belfast that runs a year-round programme of art exhibitions, musical soirées and immersive experiences. Tickets are £7, or £6 for concessions, and the talk starts at 2:00pm on Sunday 25 October.
