Reading and Discussion: Virtual and Other Realities

Endlessly inventive, the late great Edwin Morgan published ‘Virtual and Other Realities’ in 2011, challenging convention and pushing the boat out to the last. Join this panel for a more on-the-nose exploration of one of the themes of our festival, with a focus on the ‘other realities’ revealed in the poetry of three very contemporary writers – Sam Riviere, Suzannah Evans and Nicky Melville, chaired by Scott J Lawrie. An antidote, perhaps, to the notion elsewhere in the program that poetry is an endless source of consolation and balm for the soul, their works are at times dystopian, at others surreal, but all carefully puncture the notion that there is a fixed or singular way of existing in and interpreting the world around us.