My Invertebrate Afternoon - poetry reading

BOOK TICKETS Free event but numbers are limited, so please book a ticket

Join poet Simon Zonenblick for My Invertebrate Afternoon, a celebration of all things creepy and crawly! The event launches Simon's full-length poetry collection, An Invertebrate Fable (Brambleby Books 2022), a collection featuring ten sequences of poems together with full colour photographs,  as the centre piece of an afternoon of poetry and prose. 

Taking in a wide cast of characters, from butterflies, dragonflies and beetles, to slugs and snails, slowly marching millipedes and scuttling centipedes, Simon's poems traverse the English countryside, its hedges and roads sides, woodlands, grasslands, dunes, ponds and rivers, as well as more domesticated or urban habitats, in search and in praise of these slippery creatures.   Simon will also be reading from his earlier pamphlet, Little Creatures and sundry other poems, published and unpublished, on invertebrate themes, as well as poems and pieces by authors past and present from the UK, US, Africa, China, and beyond.  He'll be looking at invertebrates in their own right, exploring their natural behaviours and environments, and including excerpts from my nature columns for the Halifax Courier and other newspapers, as well as from celebrated writers like Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka.

2019 Laureate's Choice poet Victoria Gatehouse has written of An Invertebrate Fable, "I found the book quite beautiful with the combination of rich and sensual poems alongside the photographs," 

About Simon

I last read my poetry in Prestwich at the 2018 festival, when I selected several poems from my Little Creatures volume at an open mic event at Time for Tea on Bury New Rd.  Although I live 'over the border' in West Yorkshire, I am often in Manchester, and am a regular visitor to the Prestwich area, where Prestwich Clough among other places has proved fertile ground for my wildlife explorations.  As part of this Invertebrate Afternoon event, I will be delivering poems specifically written in response to visiting the Clough, inspired by my invertebrate discoveries there.