E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome the significant poet Elaine Feinstein (pictured) to its pages this Friday. She read for my Oxfam series last year, and then again recently in London at Foyles (with Michael Schmidt ), where she launched her excellent and moving new collection from Carcanet, Talking to the Dead . Feinstein was born in Liverpool, brought up in Leicester, and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has written fourteen novels, such as The Border , Loving Brecht and Dark Inheritance . She has written radio plays, television dramas, and five biographies; one of these, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet , was short listed for the biennial Marsh Biography Prize. In 1993, she was Writer in Residence for the British Council in Singapore, and in 1996 in Tromso, Norway. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in 1998. Her novels and biographies have been translated into French, Spanish,German, Italian, Danish, Hungarian, Czech, Hebrew, and Chinese; and her poetry ...

Good news, this reading has been selected as a Time Out London Critics' Choice for the week of March 28-April 3! 7 POETS FOR 2007 SERIES Oxfam Spring Poetry Reading Thursday, March 29, 7pm Oxfam Books & Music 91 Marylebone High Street, W1 (near Baker Street tube station) Featuring: James Byrne is the editor of The Wolf magazine and a respected young poet in London. His first collection Passages of Time was published by Waterways in 2003 and he is currently finishing a second book. He has worked for the Poetry Translation Centre and has recently given readings at the Groucho Club, The Green Mill (Chicago) and for Poet in the City. Earlier in 2007, James received a shortlist for this year's Eric Gregory competition. Melanie Challenger is an award-winning writer. She co-authored Stolen Voices with Zlata Filipovic. She adapted the Anne Frank diaries into a choral work which was televised by BBC from Westminster Palace in 2005. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry...

While all media attention in the UK was yesterday on Northern Ireland and its cleavages, Quebec, a multilingual province of more than six million people the size of Europe, went to the polls in an election that, once again, confronted the issue of whether it should secede from Canada or retain its union with the federal government. Last night, the (somewhat) pro-federalist Liberal's Jean Charest (pictured) won light backing for a minority government - the first in the province for 130 years. It will be curious to see how Charest manages to keep things going for more than another 18 months or so, like this - but he may learn a trick or two from Harper, Canada's right-wing PM. The good news is that the PQ (the separatist party) came third. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/quebecvotes2007/story/2007/03/26/qv-liberals20070326.html

Eyewear is glad to report that Derek Mahon , the Irish poet, pictured, has been awarded The David Cohen Prize for Literature at an award ceremony hosted by the British Library on March 22. According to the prize's site: "this biennial prize, valued by writers as the most coveted literary award in the British Isles .... is awarded to a writer from the UK or Ireland in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement in literature. The winner of the 2007 David Cohen Prize for Literature will be presented with a cheque for £40,000. ... The winner of the David Cohen Prize is selected by a panel of judges comprising distinguished authors, literary critics and academics. The prize does not accept submissions, nor does it publish a shortlist. The panel for 2007, chaired by the Poet Laureate, Professor Andrew Motion , includes Liz Calder , Anne Enright , Jackie Kay , Hilary Mantel , Rt Hon Lord Chris Smith , Sir Peter Stothard , Boyd Tonkin and Jeremy Treglown . ... Previous winners of the D...

Eyewear is glad to welcome Barbara Smith (pictured) this Friday. I met Smith recently in Galway, where we both read, and enjoyed the conversation. Born in Dublin in 1967, her work has appeared in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland, in journals such as Borderlands Texas Poetry Review , Garm Lu , Agenda , nthposition , The SHOp and west47online. A chapbook, Poetic Stage came out in 1998, and a collection, Kairos , is forthcoming. Trench Monument It wasn’t the flies so much as the reek caught downwind that giddied passers by. The lush green of new moulted shoots smoothed the vale down to the river. Behind, a stand of pines on the crown of the hill. The buzzing became an engine purring closer towards the hill crest. Carcass caverns loomed stark lying as they had done, in November permafrost. But now, in spring, white maggots blindly crept from thawing flesh remnants, writhing, vying for their own stale warmth, feeding the biomass, reducing the remains to a future fossil. Particles of ...

Sad news. Regular contributor to nthposition , Tanya Reinhardt died in New York on 17 March age 63. She wrote her doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Noam Chomsky , and taught at the universities of Tel Aviv and Utrecht. In December 2006, she left Israel and taught at New York University. Tanya was married to the poet and translator Aharon Shabtai. http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2038790,00.html

Chapman 109 is just out, with a cover feature on Stewart Conn , at 70. Chapman is "Scotland's quality literary magazine" and I am glad to note that I have six poems in the current issue. Do check out their site at www.chapman-pub.co.uk and subscribe. As per an earlier post, it is important to support the magazines that form, and inform, poetry in the UK.