Book Space Cardiff
I Sing to the Greenhearts tickets
I Sing to the Greenhearts tickets
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Join Maggie Harris for some readings from her new collection. The evening will be introduced by Rhian Edwards, the poetry editor for Seren books. We will also have readings from other poets TBA.
When: 22/5/25 18:30 start (doors 18:10)
Where: 26a Crwys Road, CF24 4NL
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There will be books available to buy at the event or you can preorder below.
I Sing to the Greenhearts - £10.99
There is an option to pay what you can as we would like to keep this event accessible for all. There is a limited number of PWYC tickets so please only use it if you need to.
About the book:
Haunted by ghosts of colonial history, Maggie Harris’s I Sing to the Greenhearts challenges the dullness of the pastoral, unafraid to engage with Western art in critiquing how we view the environment. For example, ‘The Daydream, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ reaches behind the beauty personified by the painter’s model to the reality of the wild. Writing on Pre-Raphaelite Joanna Mary Boyce’s ‘Head of a Mulatto Woman’, the black woman in the painting stands in for many resilient women – often mothers and grandmothers – that Harris finds in modern day life.
Guyana’s Greenheart tree appears here as one of many plants with attitude, plants that know their history, plants bringing the wild in from the edges. They are transplants in a thriving Welsh garden, in poems such as ‘My Banana thinks on Louise Bennett’s “Colonisation in Reverse”’. Untamed nature lurks at the edges of the poems, through the disruption of migration, marriage, and re-settlement. Parakeets rehome in the UK. A lynx escapes from Ceredigion Zoo. The wild nourishes, evokes memory, reassures, and ties time and place together even as migration disturbs, upsets and challenges. I Sing to the Greenhearts presents a world where both ecological crisis and justice are at stake.
About the author:
Maggie Harris is Winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature, Regional Winner of The Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2014 and the Wales Poetry Award 2020. In 2024 she was awarded a DYCP (Developing your creative potential, Arts Council England) grant towards re-visiting Guyana and its rainforests, following the discovery of oil. She is published in journals including Poetry Wales, Wasafiri, Magma, The Caribbean Writer and Seaside Gothic. I Sing to the Greenhearts is her eleventh book.
