Manchester Lit Festival + Bolton

A wonderful reading at the Manchester Lit Festival, on October 10th with Jeffrey Wainwright and Matthew Welton, moderated by John McAuliffe. This was my second trip to Manchester, where I've thoroughly enjoyed meeting these Northern poets and hearing them read from their new books.

The next night it was over to Bolton with Canadian poet Evan Jones, who teaches at the university there. Evan's most recent book is Paralogues. Evan is also the editor (with Todd Swift) of Modern Canadian Poets: an Anthology, also from Carcanet.

I had a day to explore Manchester, and ended up at the Art Museum, where there was a room full of drawings and paintings by British WW1 artists, commemorating the Battle of the Somme which was, of course, a hundred  years ago, in the summer of 1916. I visited the battlefields of the Somme, north of Paris, some years ago, on a school trip, and I remember very clearly the various sites, including some of the Canadian trenches. Last summer I also read some of Pat Barker's grippingly human novels about the artists commissioned to record Britain's side of both world wars. Here's an image from the Manchester Art Museum's show: http://manchesterartgallery.org/exhibitions-and-events/exhibition/goodbyetoallthat/