Antony Dunn Inbetween Days poetry launch
Thu 22 Oct, 7.00pm
with special guests Rachel Curzon and Nicky Kippax
New Northern Poets (Word Up North)
Pay What You Can
All proceeds support the charitable work of Riding Lights Theatre Company
Antony Dunns Inbetween Days [https://valleypressuk.com/products/inbetween-days] inhabits the charged territory between childhood and parenthood: a place of intense pleasure, pressure, responsibility and joy.
In poems that call and respond to his previous collection, Take This One to Bed , Dunn traces lines of inheritance and succession from not-quite-grandfather to hard-born, hard-won son, from poet to poet, from younger selves to older ones. These are poems of lives entangled with other lives, of sorrow accumulated and love stubbornly renewed, finding refuge in the most surprising places.
Poised between celebration and lament, between the dead and the living, Inbetween Days [https://valleypressuk.com/products/inbetween-days] is an urgent, intimate and vividly alive collection, written after a decades distraction during a year-long residency in the poets own back-garden shed.
A collection I didn't know I'd been thirsting for absolutely gorgeous and a joy to read, keenly tuned to all our loves, guilts and griefs, punctuated by an aviary of strange winged prayers and written with a craft so deep and fluent that the whole collection is as musical and supple as wren-song.
FIONA BENSON
This is a wonderful collection, measured and lucid, economical and unclouded, full of poems that can make light work of heavy weather, often walking the microtonal terrain between childhood and parenthood the borderlands of letting go to cast a wry, level eye over proceedings, quietly revelatory and truthful.
PAUL FARLEY
Antony Dunn has previously published four collections of poems; Pilots and Navigators (Oxford University Press), Flying Fish (Carcanet OxfordPoets), Bugs (Carcanet OxfordPoets) and Take This One to Bed (Valley Press). He edited and introduced Ex Libris, the posthumous collection of poems by David Hughes (Valley Press).
Antony has been the winner of the Newdigate Prize and an Eric Gregory Award.
He is a regular tutor for The Poetry School, has taught many times for the Arvon Foundation and has worked on a number of translation projects with poets from Holland, Hungary, Israel/Palestine and China.
Antony has been Poet in Residence at Ilkley Literature Festival, the University of York and the People Powered Press. Until 2018 he was Artistic Director of the Bridlington Poetry Festival. He lives in Leeds.
Inbetween Days is available to pre-order now from Valley Press:
https://valleypressuk.com/products/inbetween-days
Rachel Curzon is based in Yorkshire. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and her debut pamphlet was published in 2016 under the Faber New Poets scheme. More recent work has appeared in Poetry London, The London Magazine, Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Rachel was a New Northern Poet for 2025.
Nicky Kippax is a Northern Writers Award winner and her work is widely published most recently in The London Magazine, Poetry Oxford, PN Review, The Rialto and Poetry News. She has received two Forward Prize nominations for best single poem (written). Nicky has been shortlisted for The Brotherton Prize, The Bridport Prize, The Ginkgo Prize and The Bath Fiction Prize. She lives in York where she co-hosts Rise Up! a celebration of poetry and the spoken word and is editing her first collection.
