ORIGINALLY from Northern Ireland, Brendan Cleary is one of the UK’s most instinctively gifted poets and master of the art in performing poetry, as Petersfield audiences can judge.
Write Angle is hosting a man whose early work deals with his childhood in a region where ‘Despair, like rust, is contagious’, but life in an England of broken ideals and rampant class prejudice comes in for equally biting treatment.
Honed by his experience as a live performer, his lyrics have a hard-hitting immediacy as he questions his place in the world around him and his affiliation to the culture and traditions of his country of birth. These are not poems for the fainthearted, but they provide insights into the human spirit simply not on offer in the work of less courageous artists.
He lives in Brighton where he edits a new incarnation of The Echo Room magazine. It publishes many poets who had appeared in the original series of magazines and it has retained much of its original style, including a Matthew Caley-designed cover and a substantial number of typos.
Write Angle’s gathering is at The Townhouse, High Street, Petersfield, from 7.30pm on Tuesday, June 19, and will include an open mic session. Entry is £6.