What’s on at Ware Poets?
Martin Figura and Helen Ivory
Martin Figura’s collection The Remaining Men was published in February. The book and show Whistle were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and won the Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show, an award his second show Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine was shortlisted for. He lives in Norwich with Helen Ivory and sciatica.
Helen Ivory edits IS&T and teaches online for the National Centre for Writing Academy. Wunderkammer, her New and Selected Poems was published by MadHat (US) in 2022. She has work translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Spanish, Croatian and Greek, for Versopolis. Her sixth Bloodaxe Books collection is Constructing a Witch (October 2024). She is also a visual artist and makes collage poems and shadowboxes.
The first half of this event will be open mic, so please feel free to bring and read a poem in a friendly and welcoming space.
Michael Smith
Michael Smith is a British translator and linocut illustrator of Middle English alliterative romances. We will be celebrating the launch of his new illustrated translation of the fourteenth century poem The Romance of William and the Werewolf (Unbound). This the third in his series of illustrated translations of Middle English alliterative romances, after Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Alliterative Morte Arthure.
As well as reading passages from his new book, Michael will also entertain us with short readings in Middle English (and even Old French) to give us a flavour of how our ancestors enjoyed poetry nearly 700 years ago.
Born in Warrington, Cheshire, Michael is currently studying for his PhD at the University of York, where he is conducting research into the translation, performance and effective modern representation of late medieval Middle English stanzaic poetry. He lives in Ware.
The first half of this event will be open mic, so please feel free to bring and read a poem in a friendly and welcoming space.
Hetty Cliss
Hetty Cliss is a poet and spoken word artist from the Fens in East Anglia and a graduate of UEA's Creative Writing MA. Her poems can be found in fourteen poems, Propel Magazine, Bi+ Lines, on NewWriting.Net and elsewhere. She won the Ware Poets Sonnet Prize in 2024 and her poems 'Letting Things Lie' and 'Best Not to Bring It Up' were commended in the Ware Poets 2024 main competition.
Her debut poetry pamphlet is forthcoming with fourteen poems in March 2025.
Pascale Petit
Pascale Petit was born in Paris and lives in Cornwall, she is of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. Her debut novel, My Hummingbird Father, was published by Salt in 2024. She has published nine poetry collections, four of which were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Her seventh, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe, 2017), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the inaugural Laurel Prize and was the Poetry Book Society Choice. Her eighth, Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and for Wales Book of the Year. Her ninth collection, Beast, published by Bloodaxe in April 2025, won a Society of Authors Arthur Welton Award while in progress.
We are delighted to celebrate Pascale’s new collection Beast, in which mythic and familial beasts roam the swamps and moors. These spirits of the wild haunt the Camargue of Provence, the limestone Causses and gorges of the Languedoc, Indian tiger forests, the Amazon rainforest, and her home by Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. Some of these remote places are vestiges of earth’s pristine habitats, while other wildernesses are encaged in cellars of Paris, along with the world’s last species. Their essence is evoked in lithe and luxurious lines sometimes compressed as a trapped animal.
In Beast, an estranged father reappears as a hunter, while Maman is an orb spider or a grand piano; both are predators. And there are earthly beasts – wild horses and bulls, lammergeiers, bee-eaters and catfish, remnants of a vanishing natural world. Beast asks if survival is possible in an abusive family and on an abused home planet, with trials such as climate change, childhood trauma and war. These poems face difficult challenges and insist that making art is an act of love and hope, and there are joyful lyrics celebrating the ineffable beauty of endangered species.
Author photo credit Derrick Kakembo
Troy Cabida
Troy Cabida is the author of Neon Manila (Nine Arches Press, 2025), Symmetric of Bone (fourteen poems, 2024) and War Dove (Bad Betty Press, 2020). His work has been published by Seaford Review, TLDTD Journal, and bath magg, anthologised in State of Play, Bi+ Lines, and 100 Queer Poems, commissioned by Tiffany & Co., The R.A.P. Party, and Small Green Shoots, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for Poetry 2024.
We’re delighted to welcome Troy and to celebrate his new collection Neon Manila, an exploration of the queer Filipino body in all of its skin and glitter. Looking at pop music, fashion, jewellery, dating mishaps, and everyday London life, the poems in this collection seek a better grasp of the relationships we build with ourselves, of the internal as constantly contoured by the external.