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  Chattering at School: Nature...

  Edward Forde Hickey

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  "Chattering at School" is a series of animal poems that invites the reader to learn and marvel at all the wonders of the natural world. The poems include fun narratives on the surface, while containing learning and teaching moments as the poems unfold. The book has lovely illustrations and is full of moral lessons.The introduction to "Chattering at School:  Nature poems for children" explains that these poems were written by a schoolboy aged 11 to 18 (1951-58) during his annual summer holiday visits to his grandmother on her small farm in Ireland. She had been his carer and guardian from the time of the German Blitz of London where he was born, and lived with her until the war ended in 1945. He then returned to his unknown parents, who had been unable to visit him in Ireland from the UK during the war.Over 60 years later, the author of these poems - Edward Forde Hickey - discovered them (his own schoolboy attempts at writing poetry) lying in the attic and felt they were worth recording publicly.

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  The Climbers (NHB Modern Plays)

  Carmen Nasr

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  When Yasmin and her guide, Tshering, return from a perilous expedition to Everest without a member of their party, they have a lot of questions to answer. Where is Yasmin's husband Charlie? What happened on the mountain? Why do Yasmin and Tshering's accounts differ so drastically?
  As private investigator Connie tries to distinguish hallucination from reality, and fact from delusion, it's clear that someone, somewhere, is not telling the truth.
  Set at an altitude where life hangs by a thread, Carmen Nasr's play The Climbers is a thrilling exploration of the lure of the mountains, the drive to conquer and the price of staying alive. It was first performed in June 2022 at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, directed by Guy Jones.

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  Say It With Me

  Vanessa Lampert

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  Rooted in everyday communities, the voice of Say It With Me is wry, candid and knowing, offering poems that playfully record the foibles of domestic life. There are curious stories: a parrot flies away but always returns to its master, a school bully becomes their victim's acupuncture patient in adulthood, and a donor finds new kinship with the woman who receives his cells. All these stories are gems full of curious twists and turns.Often the poems represent specific places and people, sometimes nostalgically so, like memories of family beach trips with loved ones now deceased. Others are flights of fancy: imagining a park of one's dreams, an ode to the small pleasures of life, or inventing a new history where a father didn't die young. Most significant however are the poignant and remarkable stories of family life. There are happy portraits as well as thoughtful poems concerning divorce and parenthood, also the body in triumph and decline. Though speakers take up a watchful distance from events, they are also fierce and unafraid to intervene. A middle-aged woman on the beach wades into the sea to chastise some lads playing with an inflatable sex doll."Say it with me" a line taken from the poem 'Canada'  is a phrase that often precedes a rallying cry, or a brave but controversial factual statement. The tales in this collection feel true and honest and its title is a call to unite. This is a collection about the communities in which we live and the interconnectedness of human beings. The likeable speaker of these poems surveys it all with the dry humour and wisdom of an older woman, posing scenarios that we can all recognize as authentic. Ultimately, Vanessa Lampert uses deep and rich storytelling to lay bare truths that are at once funny, moving, and illuminating.
  'The poems in Vanessa Lampert's new collection are lodestars. How lucky to be guided by them. In this book nature is more than an encounter to wonder about, it is a binding-- both to our home here on earth, the dailyness, joy and loss of that, and to our own corporeal selves. For anyone looking for the words to what it means to be human look no further: they are here.' - Matthew Dickman
  'Vanessa Lampert has a rare talent for telling stories which, although they come from a place deeply personal to her, become universal in their rendering. These are poems which welcome us in like old friends, full of warmth and generosity, and which have the sudden ability to switch gears – and with them, our emotions – in just a few short lines or phrases. Say It With Me is a remarkable first collection of poems, a book infused with darkness and light, beauty and sadness, humour and ultimately, hopefulness.' - Brian Bilston
  In Say It with Me Lampert's observant and witty voice accompanies us through subtle turns in thought, redirecting our attention with a glance, a clearing of the throat, so that we step from the scenery of life, into the resonant emotional landscape of living. Her poems open the aperture, and expose us to the loss that time is always enacting upon us, its cruelty and its beauty.' - Jack Underwood
  'Vanessa Lampert is a chronicler of minute but crucially significant moments; she holds them to the light to find their gleam and then shows them to us as stunning jewels. We enter one of her poems on the familiar ground of a summer beach or an ordinary municipal park, and leave years later, often having communed with those we've lost. What she accomplishes may seem simple, but the seismic shifts of our lives are packed into her humming lines. Her poems are like a fairground on the final night of the season – we want to clasp onto their joy and celebration that bit longer.'   -Tamar Yoseloff

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  After the Fall: Dirges Among Ruins

  Eric Tinsay Valles

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  This collection explores the creative space of poetry as a means to unravel feelings evoked by the violence of war or by everyday traumatic events. One may come to terms with uncomfortable, including unspeakable, feelings by describing them with imagery from nature and one’s immediate environment. By participating in grieving, the self can better face any lingering effects of trauma. In this creative space, dramatic speakers retell stories and give vent to contradictory feelings through silences and free play. Their accounts attest to the dappled beauty of the human condition even if the full nature, scope and effects of traumatic memories are always beyond their grasp.

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  After the Fall

  Arthur Miller

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  Arthur Miller’s famous autobiographical drama takes place inside the tortured mind of a 40-year-old lawyer. Quentin is haunted by his disastrous affair with a needy sex symbol - a character rumored to be based on Marilyn Monroe, Miller’s second wife. 
   
  An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Amy Brenneman, Anthony LaPaglia, Amy Pietz, Amy Aquino, Gregory Itzin, Claudette Nevins, Natalija Nogulich, Al Ruscio, Raphael Sbarge and Kenny Williams.

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  Drive

  Elaine Sexton

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  " Silently / pulling for itself, / the will wants the body to // give it what it wants," Sexton writes in " Between the Car and the Sea," at once a description of a car' s body propelling her onward, and of the poet herself, the one behind the wheel of this masterful fourth collection. In an extraordinary act of volition, the author does not stop at the trope of ambition, but powers instead toward the urgent concerns of the will, and intention.
  
  
  In Drive, Sexton explores our most fragile points of connection— to lovers and family, to the living and the dead, and to oneself, one' s own life' s work— with the care and wisdom of one who knows these roads. In her hands, these delicate boundaries become navigable. They are both her route and her destination.

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