Eleanor Brown Reading
Eleanor Brown’s first collection Maiden Speech, published by Bloodaxe in 1996, included her much anthologised “girlfriend’s revenge” poem 'Bitcherel'. Her second, White Ink Stains, (published three decades on) draws on women’s lives with many poems written in response to interviews made for the Reading Sheffield oral history project.
White Ink Stains was published by Bloodaxe on 24 October 2019 and was launched at Sheffield's Off the Shelf Festival on 21 October. Eleanor was reading alongside fellow Bloodaxe poet Imtiaz Dharker.
'Eleanor Brown’s first collection of poems since her acclaimed volume Maiden Speech of 1996, is freighted with unspoken empathy. This unusual and beautiful volume gathers the lost voices of the past in a benign web of poetic exegesis, restoring individual merit commemoratively and declaring an affinity with those who ‘go down in history’ unnoticed, in Tony Harrison’s resonant words.' - Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times. Read the full review here.
Monday 21 September 2020, 12pm, Festival of the Mind, Sheffield
Poetry with Eleanor Brown – Podcast
Eleanor Brown recorded a podcast reading from her second collection White Ink Stains. She read and talked about a number of the poems in the book. Her comments between poems explore ideas of inclusion, exclusion, educational opportunity, cultural gatekeeping, who gets to speak, who gets heard when they do speak, and who poetry is for.
“This unusual and beautiful volume gathers the lost voices of the past in a benign web”. Eleanor’s latest collection centres the voices of mainly working class women of the Silent Generation, whose cultural contribution is written in ‘white ink’. Many of the poems were made in response to the Reading Sheffield oral history project.
Click here to listen.
[23 September 2019]
