Please join us to celebrate the launch of Fourth and Walnut by Jeremy Over. The reading will be hosted by Matthew Welton. 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_9zRNMwR7TcmhHXZJHHfegA#/registration

Equal parts commonplace book, instruction manual and cheerful vandalism, Fourth & Walnut is absurdly joyful, gathering together words from a wide range of favourite writers and artists, erasing some and fooling with others as variations on themes and tunes are tried out.

‘Advice to a Young Poet’ opens happily with the news that Rilke can be ignored. ‘Equinox in a Box’ records a day spent gazing upwards in a James Turrell skyspace while the mind remembers, dreams and wanders out of the box.

Interludes on love and death deviate into a sequence promising an essay on reading and unpredictability, which is in turn distracted by counting snowdrops, shellacking cardboard boxes and the urge to take flight.
The book ends with an erasure of an Edwardian book for children on the ‘art of seeing’, revealing alternative vistas by looking within, and teasing, the language.

Beyond the whimsy, what the book seeks are the precise coordinates of heaven which Thomas Merton found in Louisville, on the corner of Fourth and Walnut. The search is, we learn, a kaleidoscopic and playful process of collage, digression and invention. Or, as Over puts it –

‘You have to look away
and then back a few minutes later
to notice the colour changes.’

About the speakers:

Jeremy Over was born in Leeds in 1961. He now lives on a hill near Llanidloes in the middle of Wales. His poetry was first published in New Poetries II in 1999 and he has had three subsequent collections with Carcanet: A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (2001), Deceiving Wild Creatures (2009) and Fur Coats in Tahiti (2019).

Matthew Welton’s poems take a playful approach to language and often blur the boundaries between poetry and other forms, such as fiction, music and visual art.

His three previous Carcanet books are: The Book of Matthew (2003), We needed coffee but we’d got ourselves convinced that the later we left it the better it would taste, and, as the country grew flatter and the roads became quiet and dusk began to colour the sky, you could guess from the way we retuned the radio or unfolded the map and commented on the view that the tang of determination had overtaken our thoughts, and when, fidgety and untalkative but almost home, we drew up outside the all-night restaurant, it felt like we might just stay in the car, listening to the engine and the gentle sound of the wind (2009) and The Number Poems (2016).

Matthew Welton was born in Nottingham, lives in Nottingham, and teaches creative writing at the University of Nottingham.