Reading at The Shuffle

The guest list board.

I loved having a guest slot at The Shuffle on Saturday night. It was the first time I had ever read in London or set foot in The Poetry Cafe. We’d wandered round Covent Garden looking for somewhere to eat but everywhere was full, half an hour wait for a table was too long, and we weren’t all that hungry. So we had a drink in a pub on the corner of Betterton Street until the cafe opened. I was entranced with the photographs of poets on the wall who all seemed to be giving me a personal greeting, such as Elain Feinstein, whose collection Cities I had reviewed for Stride. She kindly told me that she thought it was ‘a generous assessment of what I was trying to do’. Do check it out on Stride.

Soon we were eating a wonderful soup and I made myself known to the hosts Jaqui Saphra and Gale Burns, who made me very welcome. They hosted the occasion admirably, and shared some of their own poems, which I enjoyed a lot. I was on last so I could sit back and enjoy the variety of readings, the wonderful audience and the poetic ambience. It was especially good to hear Salt poet Agnieszka Studzinska, though I have to say every single guest was excellent, and it was a really enjoyable evening.

I’d put together a set with a range of moods, starting with my Peter Pan and Wendy poem, ‘From the Wendy House’, which tends to go down well. I followed this with two more poems from The Fiddle, one about my dad’s death and one about my mum’s. I lightened the mood again with the poem Dialectic, about angels and devils and what it is like to have a relationship with them, then a sad one from The New Generation, and two poems which are coming out in my Salt chapbook in January, including the title poem I Sing of Bricks.

I had some wonderful comments afterwards, which really made my night, and an enthusiastic message from a facebook friend who came for the first time to The Shuffle because she wanted to hear me read.

All in all, I felt my London debut went perfectly and I hope I get to read down there again sometime soon.

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