Wednesday 5 April 18:30 - 20:30

Fitzrovia Chapel
2 Pearson Square
London
W1T 3BF

Registration
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Laura Scott & Charlotte Eichler: Carcanet Book Launch

Performing & Visual Arts

Join us for the London launch of two new collections of poetry from Laura Scott and Charlotte Eichler.

Please join us to clebrate the double launch of The Fourth Sister by Laura Scott and Swimming Between Islands by Charlotte Eichler. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Drinks will be available on arrival and books will be available to purchase.

Register here and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook event.

Laura Scott's second collection, The Fourth Sister, is a book of unusual love poems. It features an assorted cast: lovers and sisters, but also parents and children, the living and the dead, birds and trees, painters, playwrights and their characters, a godfather who married the wrong man and a godmother who was surely a spy. The book's energy flows out into other lives, discovering vital connections and the gaps between them. Scott writes as a poet in Wordsworth's sense: 'an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere relationship and love.'

'Like the birds which appear in motif throughout this collection, Laura Scott's poems can turn on a wing, startling us with their displays of unexpected beauty. Her graceful - and frequently grace-filled - poems call our attention to life's off-stage moments, illuminating shadowed corners of what might so easily be lost from view.' - Kathryn Simmonds

'I so love Laura Scott's poems: elegant, taut, and both thrillingly curious and full of curiosity, they conjure their magic from that perfect space "between telling and withholding". In this beautiful, mysterious collection, she leads us into the dark woods of longing and grief, holding us rapt in the spell of the moment, until - like the fourth sister - she deftly "slips the story's collar".' - Liz Berry

Swimming Between Islands, Charlotte Eichler's first collection, has its own distinctive weathers, atmospheres and fauna. Egg collectors, moth trappers, hermits, cuttlefish, pyjama sharks and bloody henry starfish all play a part. This islanded world is the starting point for poems that explore how we try to connect with each other – despite misunderstanding, family silences and unwanted legacies.

'Read Charlotte Eichler's poems slowly, so that you can really take note of them, because they're astonishing,' said Laura Scott, responding to Eichler's poems in New Poetries VIII. Anthony Vahni Capildeo characterised her first pamphlet as 'modern pastoral, not nostalgic, and well beyond the ordinary domestic lyric'. Swimming Between Islands gathers this work with a substantial collection of new poems.

In Eichler's poems, the first person singular is relational, social; it refuses to mark one consciousness neatly off from another. The poems’ perspective is often plural, a 'we' which is one minute a couple considering marriage, the next, childhood friends divining the future from ladybirds and four-leafed clovers. The reader is invited to come close, and then right into the centre of the poem; the book progresses towards ever wilder, more isolated places in Scotland, Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska, where 'we are found: / the gannets are white flares / hitting the water / under a fishbone sky'.

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