Peter will read ‘Bobby Bendick’s Ride’, a saga of sorcery, murder, and demonic retribution, set in Northumberland and France and featuring a hitherto unknown Border Ballad.

After that, the larger part of the evening will be the launch of Sheree’s brilliant and unflinching first full-length collection Family Album, which draws on the complexities and richness of a family history located in Ghana, Barbados, Trinidad and Tyneside.

This is a free event but please book a seat by contacting the Lit & Phil on 0191 232 0192

The year is 1660. A tormented clergyman steeped in sorcery and general mayhem has drowned his crafty accomplice in the Ingram Pool at East Woodburn and gallops off from the ruins of Corsenside Church, via Chairford Bridge and Grindstone Syke, Stiddle Hill and Hepple Heugh, to take refuge among the Wild Hills of Wanney, pursued by a dreadful unnamed demon and deafened by the future roar of helicopters from the Otterburn Range.

This is the culmination of an astonishing dramatic poem by Peter Bennet incorporating a hitherto unknown Border Ballad and based on the enigma of a minor character in a ghost story by Sean O’Brien. Add to this the ghost story itself and an exhibition of superb drawings by Birtley Aris which illustrate the poem and you have the guarantee of an unforgettable evening when Peter will read the poem and Sean will read the hair-raising story.

Peter has lived close to the Wanneys for over thirty years and this is his farewell to a place that has been his major inspiration as a poet, as it was a century ago to the ballad writer James Armstrong, the author of ‘Wild Hills o’ Wannys’. Sean O’Brien is one of Britain’s most distinguished writers, best known as a poet but also a dramatist, novelist, short-story writer, and Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Birtley Aris is a well-known and much admired Hexham artist who has collaborated with contemporary poets since the 1970s, most recently with Linda France and Sean O’Brien and now Peter Bennet. The occasion is the Hexham launch of Bobby Bendick’s Ride, a limited edition publication of the poem and drawings.

Red Squirrel Press launches Defragmenting Sappho by Kevin Cadwallender
Literary & Philosophical Society, 23 Westgate Road, Newcastle NE1 1SE
Admission £3
Lit & Phil: tel: 0191 232 0192 or email: library@litandphil.org.uk

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Sappho was a poet from the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. She was born in about 630 B.C. She was an accomplished poet, singer and musician. Sadly all of Sappho’s music is lost and what we know about her life is as fragmented as her poetry, of which only one complete poem remains. Scholars in Alexandria, it is thought, collected nine books of her lyrics. Of these ‘lyrics’ we have the one complete poem and a collection of fragments.

Kevin Cadwallender is a writer who lives in Edinburgh but is a Yakker. He has a first degree in English and an MA in Radio Production & Management. His writing has appeared on telly, the radio, the internet, in books, in films, in songs, on tape, CD and DVD. He has a pathological dislike for biographies like this and would prefer not to blow his own trumpet as he is much more at home on the flugelhorn.
He has worked as a clown, a roadie, a music journalist, an actor, a nurse, a santa claus, a night porter, a floor tiler, a lecturer, a learning mentor, a youth worker a, a care assistant and he has done all these jobs to try to make ends meet and to fill biogs. Lately he has discovered that ends don’t need to meet.
He is a vegetarian, atheist, romantic, with GSOH but doesn’t want a date with anyone.