PBS Autumn Showcase: Grace Nichols and Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe: Newcastle Centre For The Literary Arts

An unmissable night of poetry with one of the UK’s most respected and beloved poets, Grace Nichols, and one of its rising stars, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, traversing language, borders, worlds.

Nichols’ new book, ‘The Tracks of My Name’ is a Poetry Book Society Choice. It sees Nichols embarking on a journey across the English countryside to the small town of Olney in Buckinghamshire, where the one-time English slave-trader (later abolitionist) John Newton lived and wrote his famous hymn, Amazing Grace which inspired her Guyanese Methodist parents to name her Grace Olney after both hymn and place. A narrative sequence that reads as a personal quest, ‘The Tracks of My Name’ lyrically and imaginatively explores the relationship between memory and history, conscience and greed, as well as a sense of place and love of landscape, through her own distinctive way of viewing the world. Elsewhere she continues the interweave between her Guyanese/Caribbean and British heritages, striking a more celebratory note with poems that draw from her various cultures.

Partly inspired by a blacksmith's apprenticeship, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe has wrought a range of gleaming elements into the poems of her second collection, ‘Stay Winter’ (Faber). Animal familiars abound, and the figure of the horse recurs: from the twin steeds of the warrior Cú Chulainn to with the champion thoroughbred Red Rum. Languages and mythologies combine - both Celtic Brigid and Greek Hephaestus appear as gods of the forge. There are pieces drawn from a powerful Irish literary heritage, including Yeats, Joyce and Heaney, as well as painterly translations of Neruda and Lorca.

‘Stay Winter[UM1.1]’ captures the 'thing of beauty' and the 'dark thing' as the poet confronts the shadow aspects of the self. It conjures a compelling wintry realm - 'forest wilderness', 'tenuous sky' - in which love is made and remade anew.

Grace Nichols was born in Guyana and has lived in Britain since 1977. Her first collection, ‘I is a Long-Memoried Woman’ (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Her tenth adult collection, it is her fourth since her Bloodaxe retrospective, ‘I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems’ (2010), following ‘Picasso, I Want My Face Back’ (2009), ‘The Insomnia Poems’ (2017) and ‘Passport to Here and There’ (2020), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She was awarded The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2021. Her poetry is studied in UK schools as part of the GCSE National Curriculum.

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe is a poet, pacifist and fabulist. Her debut, ‘Auguries of a Minor God’ (2021), was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, among others. She lives along the eastern coasts of Ireland, the Arabian Peninsula and the Blue Hill Peninsula. Her new collection, ‘Stay Winter’ is published by Faber.

Dr Tara Bergin is a Senior Lecturer in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University

This event has been made possible with support from Renaissance One and Bloodaxe Books