Five Leaves New Poetry Launch – Fiona Theokritoff and Nathan Fidler

We’re pleased to launch the seventh and eighth pamphlets in our Five Leaves New Poetry series as part of Nottingham Poetry Festival 2024 at Nottingham Central Library – join us to hear from Fiona Theokritoff and Nathan Fidler, along with guest appearances from other poets in the series.

It is a fundamental law in our universe that energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be transformed. This principle lies at the heart of Fiona Theokritoff‘s debut pamphlet, New Uses for a Wand, which follows the way our world has taken the old energy of magic and alchemy, and transformed it through inspiration, conflict and necessity into today’s energy of science and technology. The poems explore the pain as well as the inevitability of change, how our world changes, and how our global and personal relation­ships change as a result. And how humans will always struggle to love, whatever the cost.

Collecting poems with a sense of anxiety or an underlying itch – sometimes with a drop of wry humour – You Worry Too Much is the debut pamphlet of Nottingham-born poet Nathan Fidler. There are poems for people long gone, for people still here, and for tiny insects. There are poems about the strangeness of being alive, here with you. Often written last thing at night in the moments before nodding off, or after the buzz of a coffee in the morning, they acknowledge that we get these feelings sometimes, of doubt, of worry. Don’t you? There aren’t really any answers here, this isn’t a self-help pamphlet. You’ll just have to sit with that vague feeling for a while.