Celebrate National Poetry Day 2021: CANCELLED

Featherston Booktown invites you to celebrate National Poetry Day by listening to three stand-out poets who have recently published new works. We are delighted to bring Sam Duckor-Jones, Tim Grgec, and local South Wairarapa poet, Vivienne Plumb, to Featherston Bowling Club for an intimate evening of poetry readings and music in front of a log fire. We are also planning a surprise recital by NZSO cellist, Ken Ichinose, who will accompany the reading of some of Sam's poems.

Sam Duckor-Jones is an artist and writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. He will be reading two poems from his new book Party Legend. The title poem is a satirical pantoum addressing political fluffery and associated personal history mythologies. The pantoum form deploys repeated lines that may be gently altered at each refrain, creating a rolling rhythm.

Rhythm and music inform a lot of Sam's writing. In Allemande in G by JS Bach, Transposed and Arranged by SL Duckor-Jones, Sam uses the real notes in Bach's cello suite to design gleeful nonsense poetry that attempts to swirl and make shapes in the way of the source material. NZSO cellist, Ken Ichinose, will play the original Allemande and Sam will then read his transposed poem.

"Who is Marshal Tito? His accent is strange, his birthdate and name uncertain. He addresses his people in a voice that might be his own, or perhaps it is the voice of someone else.

Tim's first published book of poems, All Tito’s Children, is narrated by Stjepan and Elizabeta, two siblings in Kotoriba, a small village between two rivers in Yugoslavia. They want to know everything about the world. From their tiny corner of communist Europe, small cracks are starting to appear in their adoration of the national leader, Tito.

The book is a verse biography of Yugoslavia’s great but feared dictator, Josip Broz Tito. It is shadowed by the story of Grgec's own grandparents, who fled communist Yugoslavia in the 1950s and came to New Zealand as refugees. Lyrical and haunting, it is a multi-layered portrait of personal and political disillusionment, deception, escape, and loss."

When Ms. Vivienne Plumb reads, she successfully moves the poetry off the page and makes it come alive.

Vivienne has read from one corner of the globe to another, representing New Zealand literature at the Chicago Festival of Humanities, Cuirt Festival in Ireland, the famous Cody's Bookshop in San Francisco (now sadly closed), Queensland Poetry Festival, Vilenica in Slovenia, the Sydney Writers' Festival, the World Poetry Festival in Kuala Lumpur, the fantastic Massolit Bookshop in Krakow, besides many smaller events and university readings in cities such as Hong Kong, Berlin, Iowa City, London, Melbourne, Florence, St Louis, Athens, Warsaw, and Taiyuan.

She will read from her new chapbook of poems, 'Lotus'.

There will be a cash bar and a light supper served to enhance your listening experience. The poets' books will be available for sale and the poets will sign books after the event.