Poetry Readings by two award winning poets, Caroline Smith & Erica Hesketh.
Poetry about the end of life and the beginning. These poets write powerfully and movingly about the challenges of dementia and early motherhood. Their poetry finds the heartache and joy that will resonate with all those caring for loved ones.
Bycatch by Caroline Smith is published by Nine Arches Press in Autumn 2025.
'In Bycatch Caroline Smith has created a remarkable journal of care and its complex narratives, composed throughout with striking clarity of image and compassionate observation. These finely resonant poems show us how the worlds of capacity and apparent incapacity exist all in the same moment - her ageing parents’ house ‘like an unlocked church’, generous and vulnerable; her father’s shoe, unrecognised by him, ‘like a tugboat guiding him through the fog’; and most joyfully of all his un-anchored language ‘high up in the roof of the cloud forest/ broken free of the ground.’ Jane Draycott
Caroline Smith lives in Wembley. She is author of 'The Immigration Handbook' which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and translated into Italian. Widely published in journals and the recipient of many poetry prizes, she is a 2025 Hawthornden Fellow.
In the Lily Room by Erica Hesketh was published by Nine Arches Press in Spring 2025
'Medical misogyny, birth trauma, postnatal depression, joy and boredom - all of this and more are held in place in these lyrical, image-drenched poems as Hesketh expands our ideas and perceptions around what it means to be a mother.’ Kim Moore
Erica Hesketh is originally from Japan and Denmark she is now based in London. Her poetry has been commissioned by the Royal Festival hall, Spread the Word and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Poet and editor, she was previously Director of the Poetry Translation Centre.
