Poetry Above the Crypt at St Mary Islington: Poetry Reading and Book Launch

Everyone is warmly invited to celebrate the London launch of Selected Poems by Paul McLoughlin (1947-2021), published by Shoestring Press (Nottingham, 2024).

Readers will include Rob Selby, Declan Ryan, Rosemary Norman, Nancy Mattson, John Harvey, Mike Bartholomew-Biggs, John Forth (editor) and John Lucas (publisher).

Paul McLoughlin. Poet. Teacher.

Jazz musician. Editor. Reviewer. Friend.

Paul was born and lived his whole life in West London but retained strong family links with the West of Ireland. His visits to Murreigh inspired dozens of poems throughout his collections.

Selected Poems draws on the whole of The Road to Murreigh (2010) and two early pamphlets which together form an unusually strong beginning and which may now be harder to come by. In addition, his two Shoestring collections (2007 & 2017) are well represented, and there is a glance in the direction of two posthumous Severn Press collections of unpublished work (2021 & 2022) which Paul gathered during the period following his pioneering editorial and critical work on the poet Brian Jones.

When the late Helen Dunmore wrote of Paul’s ‘rare clarity and exactitude’ and Anne-Marie Fyfe expressed delight in ‘his Irish exuberance for the absurd and the askew’, they just about captured his full range between them.

Paul also loved jazz and played in various combos.

Free entry. Free cakes and coffee. Donations welcome to Hospice Care Kenya.