Please join us to celebrate the launch of Passion by David Morley. The reading will be hosted by Sinéad Morrissey.

The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing.

Drawing on Romany language, storytelling and the speech of birds, award-winning poet David Morley offers a provocative and passionate invitation to reflect afresh on the ways in which the lives, stories and fate of humans – and the more than human – are twinned and entwined.

In poems that crackle with verbal energy, he invokes a world where God is Salieri to Nature’s Mozart, in which hummingbirds hover like actors ‘in a theatre of flowers’, pipistrelles become piccolos, swans swerve comets, and a Zyzzyx wasp is ‘a zugzwang of six legs and letters’. There are exuberant celebrations of Romany language in the style of Edward Thomas; of how a Yellowhammer inspired Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; of the world-shaping discoveries of women scientists; and an autobiographical sequence, which roots this poet’s authority and reflects on how power shapes what may be said in public.

David Morley is an ecologist and naturalist by background. He studied Zoology at the University of Bristol and pursued research on acid rain. His awards for poetry include the Ted Hughes Award and a Cholmondeley Award. His last poetry collection FURY was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. David is a Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Sinéad Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. She has published six collections with Carcanet as well as a selected poems, Found Architecture (2020). Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times Award (2009, 2013) and the T S Eliot Prize for her fifth collection, Parallax, in 2013. In 2016 she received the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her latest collection, On Balance (2017) was awarded the Forward Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. In 2020 Sinéad Morrissey was named the European Poet of Freedom by the City of Gdańsk, Poland and in 2024 she was the recipient of the Seamus Heaney Award (Japan). She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Sinéad Morrissey is a frequent contributor to PN Review.