Head Lines
Two prizewinning poets, Peter Wallis and Sally Festing, present family poems about the head, both in its physical and mental aspects.
How can the effects of something like schizophrenia, bear on future generations? Family history and a cache of intimate letters suggest answers in poems that shed light upon the establishment of the Mental Health Foundation by Sally’s father seventy years ago.
Similarly, how does repeated brain surgery impact on families? What if the patient has an identical twin? The answers come in poems that see, “life as something tentative as well as tender” (Andrew McMillan).
We enjoy rapport with audiences, and welcome discussion.
Sally Festing’s fifth poetry collection, My Darling Derry will be out in 2019. Salaams was published by Happenstance; Font, and Doors Opening (Oversteps) appeared in 2015. Her prizes include the Cafe Writer’s Norfolk slot. (www.sallyfesting.info). Poetry has followed journalism, radio plays, academic studies, Penguin biographies of Gertrude Jekyll and Barbara Hepworth, and other nonfiction books. She runs Saltmarsh Poetry in North Norfolk.
Peter Wallis won publication of a pamphlet, Articles of Twinship, in the Bare Fiction Debut Poetry Collection Competition 2015, was shortlisted in the 2016 National Poetry Competition and longlisted in that of 2017. A former Eastern Arts Association Visiting Writer and Primary School Poet In Residence, he is currently Submissions Editor for the U.K. charity “Poems in the Waiting Room”.