‘What is the difference between surfaces and closeness?’
Our 2023 resident poet is Tessa Berring. Based in Edinburgh, Tessa is the author of Bitten Hair and Folded Purse (Blue Diode Press), Putty (If A Leaf Falls Press) and Cut Glass and No Flowers (Dancing Girl Press). She also works in visual art, art writing, translation, and collaboration. Her love of poetry centres around an attention to language as an elastic and emotional material, both transparent and opaque. Texture and intimacy, metonymy and riddles, all play a role in her writing practice – and always and deliberately woven through with the taut tender edges of silence.
‘The need for reality gives us strangeness. The strangeness gives lyric, that voice, so delicate and so raw: one feels like one is overhearing a love song in a time when all love songs are in crisis.’ (Ilya Kaminsky, on Bitten Hair)
‘Tessa Berring’s Folded Purse is a rigorous and playful study of the known world and its ultimately unknowable things.’ (Ellen Dillon, on Folded Purse)
Tessa will read at our annual St Ives September Festival event at St Senara’s Church, Zennor on Weds 20th Sept. She will be joined by Cornwall-based writer-artists Kate Walters and Camilla Stacey.
The Grammarsow is deeply grateful to the Edwin Morgan Trust for a travel grant, and to Rebecca Althaus for help with accomodation.