The Writing Line-up:

Jane Routh is a poet and photographer who manages woodlands and a flock of geese in the Forest of Bowland, North Lancashire, where she’s lived for the last thirty years. Books she returns to most often are by the American poet Charles Wright, and she’d travel a long way to see exhibitions by the photographers Thomas Joshua Cooper or Olivia Parker.

Her first collection Circumnavigation (Smith/Doorstop won the Poetry Business Competition and was shortlisted for a Forward Prize.  Teach Yourself Mapmaking followed in 2006.

Jennifer Copley has a string of recent competition successes to her credit including National winner in the Ottakar’s and Faber Poetry Competition 2006 and being highly commended for her entry in the Forward Prize 2007. 'My poems are about my family, my son's illness, my mother's death, my father's senility. Others are quite dark with a touch of menace. Others tell a story. Most recent work is a sequence of 12 poems which chronicle 6 months in the lives of 3 sisters who have been dragged off to Africa in the 1900's, their father being a Methodist Missionary. Plenty of sex and chicken-bones.'

Jennifer wrote poetry secretly in her teens - helped with the misery of boarding-school. She trained as a teacher, married, had three children. 'Youngest was disabled so until he went to university, did no serious writing. In 1994 took an Open College of the Arts poetry course which kickstarted my writing. Then did an MA at Lancaster University which was amazing. Met other writers for the first time. Was so much in awe of them that I hardly spoke for a year. Eventually learned to trust my own voice.'

Mike Barlow was winner of the National Poetry Competition 2006 with his poem The Third Wife. He has previously won First Prize in the Ledbury Poetry Competition 2005, and First prize in the Amnesty International Competition 2002.

His first collection Living On The Difference was overall winner of the Poetry Business Competition 2004 and subsequently short-listed for the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize for Best First Collection in 2005. It has been described as a collection with ‘cumulative power, cohesion and a particular, individual voice’(Gillian Clarke). Reviews have referred to a ‘questing intelligence and… a refusal to accept or offer easy answers’ (Acumen) and ‘free verse so weighed and paced it shows an elegance and care beyond any achieved by formal styles’ (Dreamcatcher).

His second collection, Another Place, was published by Salt Publishing in October 2007.  

James Wood is known locally as an excellent guitarist and musical inovator. At Spotlight he will be performing a contemporary graphic score with a double bassist and two songs with a vocalist.

Joe Spence started playing guitar at the start of 2005 and then wrote some songs - 'Something like that anyway.'  Since then he has become a highly skilled acoustic musician writing 'cleverly contrived and lyrically heavy songs'. He has become a regular at Spotlight, appearing with the equally talented Andy Raven of How's My Pop, a band with a growing reputation and a buzz about their name.


'Hugely impressive. Cleverly contrived a lyrically heavy songs' - Mid Wales

© Lancaster Spotlight | created at www.mrsite.com