Join us in the East Quay Kitchen at 7pm on Thursday 27 June for an evening with Isabel White her FANTASTIC EKPHRASTIC SHOW.

Isabel White’s third and latest poetry collection, ‘Scallywag’, contains 70 ekphrastic poems, the book being divided into three sections – ‘Gallery’ poems about art and sculpture, ‘Libretti’, poems about literature, and ‘Cantata’, poems about music.

Isabel thinks she knows about art. We asked Andrew Graham-Dixon, Waldemar Januszczak and Will Gompertz. They all said they had never heard of her! So, why not waste an hour of your life you won’t get back, finding out all kinds of useless facts and goss about your favourite artists, writers and musicians. There’s audience participation too.

Isabel performs a selection of the poems, bookending each one with anecdotal information and personal stories, designed to bring to life both the artwork on which it is based and the journey the poet took to arrive at the finished piece, with several (often pointless) diversions along the way.

The range of topics covered is truly eclectic, celebrating both high and low art, and is genuinely accessible to a very wide audience, from ‘those who don’t get poetry' all the way to the connoisseur of great music, painting and sculpture. Isabel uses dialect, patois, accents, idioms, metaphor, rhyme, alliteration andonomatopoeia to great effect, and the show only contains one expletive!

The Phantastic Ekphrastic Show was given a trial run in Clevedon in October 2022,where a wider selection of work was whittled down to the current running time, based on the works that received the most positive responses. It has since been performed in part or whole in London and Bristol, with other venues lining up for the summer and autumn this year.

About Isabel
Founder of poetry collective Alarms & Excursions, Isabel has been writing and performing for over 20 years. A prize winning, published poet, she has performed at festivals all over the UK, in Paris and Rotterdam, working with a host of familiar names - including Liz Berry, Bernadine Evaristo, Kate Fox, Matt Harvey, John Hegley, Michael Horowitz, Elvis McGonagall, Daljit Nagra, Robert Hardy. Amongst over a dozen other successes, Isabel was twice finalist in the BBC Radio 3 Proms competition, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. She served six years on the board of the Poetry Society and is currently a director of Modern Poetry in Translation. Her work has appeared in over 30 magazines and anthologies on three continents, and she has three full collections and two pamphlets published to date. Her next collection is due early next year.

Tickets cost £5. Booking essential.