Please join us to celebrate the launch of More Sky, the debut collection from Eric Gregory Award winner Joe Carrick-Varty. Hosting the reading will be poet and writer Anthony Anaxagorou. 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.

More Sky is a remarkable and remarkably various debut collection from Eric Gregory Award winner, Joe Carrick-Varty, tracking the ways in which experience of addiction and domestic violence shape a life.

Carrick-Varty approaches difficult material with great skill and poise: here we find stunning individual lyrics, with an eye for the vivid and surreal; surprising sequences which use Buddhism and Greek myth and the life of coral to refract the poems’ interests; and the astonishing sixty-three page long poem ‘sky doc’ which meditates on suicide, and its retrospective haunting of every corner of its speaker’s life.

‘The poems in More Sky perform as one sustained hymn, socialising the reader around an environment where material class, artefact, image and mood all work to resist each other. Though such a fraught and contradictory space, the psychology of Carrick-Varty’s verse asks us to consider the ways addiction, fatherhood and the longings of a son coalesce to form a deep and ineffable yearning. These are tender, interior poems that contain all the hallmarks of realism while being masterfully set against an image-range both expansive and unhinged. Carrick-Varty has created something wholly individual and inspired with this collection.’ Anthony Anaxagorou

‘Whatever I expected as I sat to read it for the first time, I failed to anticipate More Sky. How could I have known how complete it would be, how achieved? These poems are loaded with frightening beauties, lines and ideas that inhabit one – rather than merely stopping by for a brief visit – from the moment they’re encountered, and together these poems accomplish an even rarer thing: They make a particular, personal story felt by the reader as if lived by the reader, which is better and more difficult than diluting a story by making it universal. More Sky is a debut as strong as any debut I’ve read in years.’ Shane McCrae

‘These poems make up a memory system. Each by each, they recover a father-son journey through drink and time. Now brutally, like broken glass under foot. Now gently, like being carried over the jagged edges. Cutting and healing. Joe Carrick-Varty writes with a sharp eye and a strong hand.’ Jeanette Winterson

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.

Please note that there is a limited number of places for the reading, so do book early to avoid disappointment. You should receive a confirmation email with details on how to join after you register. If this does not arrive, please contact us to let us know. Please also be aware that clicking ‘attending’ on the Facebook event will not guarantee your place – you must complete the Zoom registration here https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_LQR0qf1kQDuUJZ_ab4RLwg

Joe Carrick-Varty is a British-Irish poet, writer and founding editor of bath magg. He is the author of two pamphlets of poetry: Somewhere Far (The Poetry Business, 2019) and 54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to My Father (Out-Spoken Press, 2020). His work has appeared in the New Statesman, The Poetry Review and Poetry London. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2022. More Sky is his debut collection.

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His work has also appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts. His second collection After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year. In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry. He was awarded the 2019 H-100 Award for writing and publishing, and the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award for his poetry and fiction. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow of the University of Roehampton. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.