Writing on the Wall is delighted to announce a special night to launch Liverpool-born poet Paul Birtill’s superb new poetry collection.

Writing on the Wall is delighted to announce a special night to launch Liverpool-born poet Paul Birtill’s superb new collection, Blissful Oblivion: Poems 2022–2026, published by Writing on the Wall.

Described by John Cooper Clarke as a poet who “makes me laugh and feel depressed at the same time and that’s a rare gift”, Birtill has built a distinctive body of work from the darker, stranger and frequently ridiculous sides of everyday life.

Blissful Oblivion finds him in unmistakable form. Ageing, mortality, family, childhood, sex, religion, memory, loneliness and the sheer inconvenience of being alive all come under his uncompromising gaze. The result is poetry that can move in a few lines from bleakness to laugh-out-loud comedy – and sometimes manage both at once.

At the launch, Paul will read from Blissful Oblivion as well as from earlier collections and will join us in conversation about this new collection, his Liverpool beginnings and his life in poetry.

Born in Walton, Liverpool in 1960 and now living in London, Paul Birtill has published numerous poetry collections with Hearing Eye and Wrecking Ball Press, including New and Selected Poems. His plays have also been staged at London theatres, including Squalor, which was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award.

Direct, funny, uncomfortable and sharply observant, Birtill’s poetry has little interest in pretending that life makes more sense than it does. As he writes elsewhere in the collection, poetry became a means of “translating pain into words” – an approach that lies at the heart of this funny, melancholic and unmistakably human collection.

Tickets:

£5 – Event only

£15 – Event plus a copy of Blissful Oblivion

Description supplied by the event organiser.