Please join us to celebrate the launch of Child Ballad by David Wheatley, a Poetry Book Society Winter Recommendation 2023. Hosting the reading will be Ailbhe Darcy. 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.

In Child Ballad, David Wheatley’s sixth collection, he explores a world transformed by the experience of parenthood. Conducting his children through landscapes of Northern Scotland, he follows pathways laid down by departed Irish missionaries and by wolves. He maps a rich territory of rivers, trees and mountains. Also present are histories, some evidenced, some no longer visible and yet to be inferred.

Stylistically, Child Ballad is multifaceted, drawing on influences from the Scottish ballad tradition and the Gaelic bards, on French symbolism and on the American Objectivists. Wheatley is an Irish poet living and teaching in Scotland: as a cultural corridor, his Scotland is a space of migrations and palimpsests, different traditions held in dynamic balance and fusion. Writing across geographical and historical distances as he does, Wheatley develops an aesthetic of complex intimacy, alert to questions of memory and loss, communicating the ache of the here and now. He sees through the eyes of young children and the world looks very different in its gifts and threats.

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.

David Wheatley was born in Dublin in 1970. He is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including The President of Planet Earth (Carcanet, 2017) and various other books including a novel, Stretto (CB Editions, 2022); he has also coedited with Ailbhe Darcy The Cambridge History of Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2021). He lives in rural Aberdeenshire with his family.

Ailbhe Darcy was born in Dublin in 1981 and brought up there. She studied for her PhD and MFA at the University of Notre Dame in the US, and taught there and at the University of Münster in Germany. She is now a lecturer in creative writing at Cardiff University. She has published her poetry in Ireland, Britain and the US. Selections of her work are included in the Bloodaxe anthologies Identity Parade and Voice Recognition, and in her pamphlet A Fictional Dress (tall-lighthouse, 2009). Imaginary Menagerie (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), her first book-length collection, was shortlisted for Ireland’s dlr Strong Award at Poetry Now / Mountains to Sea. A collaboration with S.J. Fowler, Subcritical Texts, was published by Gorse in 2017. Her second collection, Insistence, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018 and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2018 and the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2019. It won the won the Pigott Poetry Prize 2019 in association with Listowel Writers’ Week, Ireland’s largest poetry prize. It also won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award, the English language poetry category of the Wales Book of the Year Awards, and went on to be awarded the overall prize, Wales Book of the Year 2019. In 2020 Ailbhe Darcy presented a BBC Radio 4 feature on Inger Christensen’s book-length poem alphabet, the work to which inspired the final sequence of her second collection Insistence.