Centre MA poetry students with tutors
Centre students storm Central Library
Poetry students studying the MA in Creative Writing here at the Centre decamped to Manchester Central Library on 18 July to showcase the work they've produced over the last year.The free lunchtime reading attracted a bumper crowd who balanced along the room's window ledges to squeeze everybody in.
Maria Nixon bravely took the stage first and enthralled the audience with her reaction, while travelling through Sydney, to news that soldiers - "diggers" as they're known in Australia and New Zealand - had been found buried in France and the irony that language inherently contains.
Anna Marie Parry read poems that focussed on childhood and innocence. She powerfully evoked the past when her protagonist recalled that she "couldn't remember what it was like before having a bath on a weekday as a child", followed quickly with she "couldn't remember what it felt like before being pregnant".
Andy Pearson, on the other hand, could remember his past. He recalled the feeling when his friend, Jenny, left her course at university to go home and realised, only then, the friendship she had provided to him in Manchester.
Rebecca Perry used dancing as a metaphor for a relationship between two people. In 'Man in the moon', she noted that after so many somersaults, everything becomes the same and "upside down" and "right way up" are rendered meaningless. In 'Cleaning the earth', Rebecca noted how everyone "goes to sea" and matched the way they went adrift to their stage in life; couples in row boats, families in barges and the elderly in cruise liners.
The question "does love happen?" preoccupied Steve Sawyer, although he concluded that "love is a lot of bad movies / a hairpin in the arse".
Finally, Laura Webb attacked suburbia and the seeming pointlessness of "unmarked photographs in attics dragged house to house" and likened the essential nut cracker required during the festive period with the nut cracking overload that Christmas inevitably brings.
The event wrapped up with group photos, smiles and hugs before the company hot-footed it to the nearest bar.