Wed, 10 Jul
|Song School, St Mary's Cathedral
Book Launch: Em Strang's 'Firebird'
The launch of award-winning poet and novelist Em Strang's new collection of poems, 'Firebird'.
Time & Location
10 Jul 2024, 19:00 – 20:30
Song School, St Mary's Cathedral, Palmerston Pl, Edinburgh EH12 5AW, UK
About
Join us for the launch of Firebird, a new poetry collection by Em Strang, at the Song
School, St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh. With a reading and Q&A.
With A+E, the Cathedral's Art and Ecology project.
Firebird
Firebird explores the fires of destruction and rebirth, both literal and spiritual. Each poem
invites the reader to consider ‘the necessity of mystery’, where grief and joy, death and
rebirth, stagnation and transformation exist alongside one another. In two sections of
ekphrastic poems, Em Strang engages with visual art by American painter and erstwhile
nun, Meinrad Craighead, and Italian Baroque painter, Caravaggio. The poems speak
specifically to Craighead’s 2004 Bosque Fire series – images made in the wake of a
devastating fire on the banks of the Rio Grande in New Mexico where she lived – and to a
number of Caravaggio’s religious paintings made between 1595 and 1609.
Biography
Em is a poet, novelist and Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Her writing preoccupations are with
nature, spirituality and the masculine. Em has published three collections of poetry with
Shearsman (Bird-Woman, 2016; Horse-Man, 2019; Firebird, 2024) and has been
shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Best First Collection Prize, the Ledbury Munthe prize for
Best Second Collection, and won the 2017 Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Award. Her first
novel, Quinn, was shortlisted for the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize and was
published by Oneworld in 2023.