Jon Stallworthy to Talk on WW2 Poet Henry Reed and W B Yeats and Alastair Reid on Pablo Neruda at the 18th Aldeburgh Poetry Fesival, Suffolk, 3-5 November, 2006

October 28, 2006

Poet and acclaimed biographer of Wilfred Owen Professor Jon Stallworthy will give a talk 'Henry Reed – The One Poem Poet?' at the Poetry Trust's 18th Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, 3–5 November 2006. His talk will be on Saturday 4th November, 3.45 pm - 4.30 pm, in the James Cable Room • PF21 • Tickets are £ 6.00. For further details please visit www.aldeburghpoetryfestival.org/html/prog_saturday4.htm.

Illustration by Jessie Ford 

Henry Reed, the author of 'Naming of Parts', probably the most anthologised English poem of the Second World War, has sometimes been seen as that freak of the literary fairground: the one poem poet. Jon Stallworthy considers more of his work – including some found in manuscript at his death – and reveals a brilliant, all but unknown, writer.

Professor Stallworthy will also talk at the festival on W B Yeats, on Sunday 5 November 11.30am - 12.30pm • Jubilee Hall • PF30 • (Tickets £8)  

'Follow Yeats into the Norman tower that he first saw in the anguish of unrequited love for one woman and purchased twenty years later to begin married life with another.' Jon Stallworthy sheds new light on secret places in the entwined life and work of the man he considers the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century.

Other speakers at the festival will include Alastair Reid, staff writer for the New Yorker , poet, friend, translator and literary collaborator of Pablo Neruda, Borges, and, in the Sixties, friend, literary collaborator and translator (into Spanish) of First World War poet and writer Robert Graves.

Alastair Reid will talk on Pablo Neruda on Sunday 5 Novevember, 10.30 - 11.15am • James Cable Room • PF29 • (Tickets: £6). His talk will immediately precede that of John Stallworthy on Yeats. Click here for further details of both talks.

'Pablo Neruda is unquestionably South America’s most significant poet and a writer with universal appeal. Poetry was his passion, his vocation throughout his long life. Inexhaustibly various, he left behind an enormous volume of work – including poems of love, praise, politics, nature, myth and history.' Neruda’s favourite translator Alastair Reid celebrates the achievement.

For full details about the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, including these and many other speakers and events, location and how to book tickets, please visit the Poetry Trust's 2006 Festival website.

The full 2006 Festival introduction is here and the programme is here.