'Thomas Hardy Sends an Email'

A THS Conference/Festival Evening of Poetry with Alison Brackenbury

Tuesday 26th July at 8.00pm - The United Church, Dorchester

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Alison Brackenbury was born in 1953, in Lincolnshire from a long line of servants and skilled farm workers. After an Oxford degree, she moved along the limestone to Cheltenham. A wilful combination of decades of clerical, then manual work, and riding on Gloucestershire’s coldest hills has produced ten collections of poetry. Her work has won an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award. Gillian Clarke, former National Poet of Wales, wrote: ‘Alison Brackenbury loves, lives, hymns and rhymes the natural world and its people like no other poet’. She will be reading from her latest collection, Thorpeness, published by Carcanet in the spring of 2022.

Alison’s poetry has frequently been broadcast on BBC Radio. Her latest programme, the Radio 4 feature, What Sweetness Touched Your Tongue?, was a Radio Times Choice and was described in Radio 4’s Pick of the Week as ‘a delicious programme’... Her reading will include a taste of the poems from the programme: celebrations of her grandmother, Dorothy Eliza – ‘Dot’ – a shepherd’s wife, who might, as a youthful Queen of Puddings, have become Mr Hardy’s cook...

As you will hear from Alison’s reading of her recent poem, ‘Thomas Hardy sends an email’, sixty years of profound respect for Hardy’s poetry have not silenced the plain speaking of her country ancestors...

Her work has won an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award, and has frequently been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4. She has published ten collections of poetry. Her most recent, ‘Skies’, (Carcanet, 2016), was chosen as a Poetry Book of the Year by ‘The Observer’. ‘Gallop’, her Selected Poems, was published in 2019 by Carcanet. New poems can be read on her website: https://alisonbrackenbury.wordpress.com/.

She is writing a non-nostalgic prose memoir, ‘Village’: not, mercifully, about herself but stories and scandals of a Lincolnshire village, still vivid after sixty years.