Please join us to celebrate the launch of The Face in the Well by Rebecca Watts. The reading will be hosted by Vona Groarke. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_D_-c-QzpQ1i4BBL6Wo3qxQ

In her vibrant third collection, Rebecca Watts shines a light on the tender, spontaneous, creative and creaturely aspects of the self, and asks how we might nurture and shield these from the many physical, psychological and social forces predisposed to keep them down.

Wearing a variety of costumes, or none at all, the characters in these dramatic poems play hide-and-seek, guarding their vulnerabilities while yearning for greater connection with others and the world. Animals, as totems and spirit guides, swim, run and fly across the pages. Children tiptoe and improvise their way through landscapes designed to curtail and bewilder them. Adults curate their own funerals, befriend spiders, try to love each other, and go to war. Poets and other heroes – Brontë, Heaney, Plath, Yeats, Mary Poppins – are confronted, reflected, refracted and left echoing anew.

‘She seems to have discovered a direct line to her speaking voice, while simultaneously maintaining the clear thought of a poet. This sets her apart. Not many can cope with these two competing sounds jabbering in their ear. If someone can do this you don’t really care what they write about because they’re in the room with you, speaking to you personally. “Resistance” is nowhere.’ – Hugo Williams

About the speakers:

Rebecca Watts was born in Suffolk in 1983 and currently lives in Cambridge, where she works as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and freelance writer, editor and tutor. A selection of her poetry was included in New Poetries VI (2015). Her debut collection The Met Office Advises Caution (2016) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Her second collection, Red Gloves, was published in 2020 and won a Gladstone’s Library Writers-in-Residence Award.

Vona Groarke has published thirteen books with The Gallery Press, including eight original poetry collections, and two translations from the Irish, most recently Woman of Winter (2023), a version of the much-loved Irish poem usually known in English as, ‘The Lament of the Hag of Beare’. She published Hereafter: the Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara with New York University Press (2022). A Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library 2018-19; former editor of Poetry Ireland Review and selector for the UK’s Poetry Book Society, she has taught at the University of Manchester since 2007. She is the current Writer in Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge, and otherwise lives in Co. Sligo in the West of Ireland.