Join us for a free evening of poetry, where we will be launching two collections of poetry by East London poets:

Jude Rosen’s collection Reclamations from London’s Edgelands (Paekakariki, 2024) – an urban pastoral poem of the marshlands and harshlands of East London, based on walks through the ecology, and echoing voices of the marshes from oral histories and archives.

Derrick Porter’s collection The Art of Timing (Paekakariki, 2024) and reading also from Voices of Hoxton (thisis, 2015) that venture far and wide from the tragi-comic childhood of a Hoxton lad to his physical, historical and literary travels round the world, taking a side swipe at the art world as he goes, and dedicating a long love poem to a Russian donkey!

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Jude Rosen is from a Jewish East End family and Hackney resident for 35 years. She is a former historian, urban researcher, translator and now works with migrants and refugees. As a poet she particularly works with oral history and narrative interviews and language, signs and symbols in the landscape. This is her first collection with Paekakariki Press.

Derrick Porter was born and brought up in Hoxton, where he spent his childhood and youth apart from years in hospital with TB. A printer by trade, he was self-educated as a poet, first published by the Centreprise worker-writers’ cooperative and later supported by the Poetry School and thisis publisher. The Art of Timing is his second collection.