Contemporary Art, Furniture & Craft Gallery · Licensed Café
Friday 30 October, 7.30pm
Tickets: £12 (under 21s £6)
Doors 6pm, hot supper available from the bar
Please phone 01308 459511 to reserve your ticket now
In a unique collaboration Dr Carole Bourne-Taylor, Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, and poet Gill Barr consider the power of poetry and the uplift of walking – in the ideal surroundings of Sladers Yard gallery.
The poet and the academic will share their joint interest in notions of place and care, attentiveness, agency and vigilance and will seek to reflect on how one might learn to dwell poetically (indeed, po-ethically). They will discuss their belief in imagination and its crucial role in promoting meaningful new relationships with and among all ‘ways of being alive’ (Baptiste Morizot).
Carole is interested in poetry as an embodied practice, from its germination to its utterance; how it resonates; how the reader feels present in the poems, feels invited to step in and share a moment of being and meaning; feels involved and implicated as if something is happening, perhaps experiencing a heightened level of awareness, exhilarating and humbling at the same time.
These reflections on poetry will be illuminated by readings from Gill Barr, the local poet, whose debut collection A Wide River Divides Us was launched in a sell-out event at Sladers Yard in October 2025.
The collection opens in the tight cityscape of 1970s Derry/Londonderry but in a dramatic shift of perspective, she leaves the city behind and embraces new landscapes. Greta Stoddart says: ‘There is a compelling development in this collection, as the child becomes the adult, moving on, moving away. The landscape widens.’ Moyra Donaldson adds, ‘The opening poems are rooted in memory and precise location, before the poet takes us out of time and into more fluid, unanchored places.’ A feature of Gill’s poetry is the psycho-geography of walking.
Gill will read from her own published and as yet unpublished work, as well as reading poems by other poets. Carole’s talk will be wide-ranging and enriching, as ‘she both deeply understands poetry and writes like a poet’ (Helen Paris)!
This promises to be an engaging evening of ideas, readings and discussion as the practising poet and the academic intertwine the delights of poetry with progress through the living world.
Gill Barr’s debut poetry collection A Wide River Divides Us was published by Cinnamon Press (2025). Her poem-film of the same name was short-listed in the Obheal International Poetry-Film Competition and selected for screening at the Vienna International Festival in April 2026.
Gill holds an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast and has received an award for her poetry from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her poems have appeared in publications such as The New Humanist, The New European, The Honest Ulsterman and Bad Lilies. Now retired, Gill taught English at secondary level for over thirty years in Cambridgeshire and in Bridport.
Carole Bourne-Taylor is Associate Professor and Fellow in French at Brasenose College, Oxford. Her research encompasses comparative studies, literature in French and English (her published doctoral thesis was on Virginia Woolf), phenomenology, the problematics of mourning and performance studies. Carole has held various prestigious positions, notably a Senior Research Fellowship at Maison de la Création et de l’Innovation (Université Grenoble-Alpes) and visiting professorships in Brussels and Vilnius.
Widely published, she actively engages in discussions about the intersection of literature, ethics, and performance. Although her research is eclectic, she has a particular passion for poetry and West Dorset (she lived in Burton Bradstock for some 10 years) and her recent publications are on the theme of dwelling.
Carole invited Gill to present her collection to a Brasenose audience, marvelling at the vividness (whether joyful or mournful) of Gill’s kinship with the landscape/seascape, her evocations of a sense of place and presence. She is delighted to accept Gill’s generous invitation to dwell poethically with her at Sladers Yard!
Please phone 01308 459511 to book your seats now.
