PN Review poetry reading at Manchester Poetry Library

Celebrating 50 years of poetry from around the world, PN Review is hosting a special reading event featuring Gregory O’Brien and others.

Following its other recent events, including at Manchester Literature Festival in October, Manchester-based poetry press Carcanet invites you to join in the final jubilee celebration as their literary journal PN Review‘s 50th anniversary year comes to a close. Taking place at Manchester Poetry Library, this in-person event will bring together poets from all over to commemorate this milestone and showcase the global impact of PN Review magazine.

Since starting as Poetry Nation, a twice-yearly hardback, in 1973, PN Review has been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the world. The archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times, including Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, WS Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, CH Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others.

This event will include a reading from Gregory O’Brien, visiting from New Zealand, and whose exhibition, From an Island in The Antipodes: Poetry and Painting by Gregory O’Brien, is running in Manchester Poetry Library until 10 February (with a public preview on Tuesday 16 January, 5.30-7.30pm).

For 40 years, New Zealand-based painter-poet O’Brien has worked at the interface between visual and verbal arts. He has exhibited paintings which have often contained words – and he has published over a dozen poetry collections which have featured his visual art. In the spirit of William Blake, David Jones, Kenneth Patchen and Stevie Smith (all of whom he considers part of the backstory), O’Brien has found a productive niche between these adjacent, overlapping territories.

Highlighting some of his recent work for PN Review and Carcanet Press, the exhibition From an Island in the Antipodes is the first northern hemisphere showing of O’Brien’s paintings, painted poems, prints, drawings artist-books and handprinted productions. The exhibition also features works made in collaboration with other artists and with other poets, among them, Bill Manhire, Jenny Bornholdt and John Dennison.

Joining Gregory O’Brien to read are Jenny Bornholdt, Kit Fan and Christine Roseeta Walker, with additional contributions from Togara Muzanenhamo, Oksana Maksymchuk, Jee Leong Koh, Fawzia Muradali Kane and others.