Book Launch: David Hopkins, FOUR WEE POETRY PERFORMANCES

Well-known Edinburgh poets and Fruitmarket regulars, David Hopkins and Jane Goldman, will celebrate the launch of David’s new collection at the Fruitmarket. Expect an evening of energetic, irreverent, humorous, surreal, performance poetry…

David Hopkins has performed his poetry over some forty years, reading at venues such as London’s ’Apples and Snakes’, Newcastle Upon Tyne’s Morden Tower, and Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket. As a professor of art history at Glasgow University he specialised in dada and surrealism and post war art and theory, producing numerous publications, including After Modern Art 1945-2017 (OUP, 2017) several books on Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, and, more recently, Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood’ (Yale University Press, 2021). Hopkins has long been committed to the practice of poetry as a spoken/sonic medium. Following contributions to various edited volumes, such as Hours (ed. David Connearn, 2002) or the CD accompanying The Order of Things: Scottish Sound, Pattern and Concrete poetry(Edinburgh: Pocketbooks, 2001), Four Wee Poetry Performances is the first substantial selection of his work to be conceived as poetry-on-the page.

Jane Goldman is a Poet and Reader in English Literature and Creative Writing at Glasgow University. She is a General Editor of the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, and has published widely on Woolf, modernism and avant-garde writing. She is a member of the 12, a collective of women poets based in Scotland, and of the Writers' Shift at the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh. Her poetry books include Border Thoughts (Sufficient Place, Leamington Books, 2014); SEKXPHRASTIKS (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021); Catullus 64 (Main Point Books, 2023), a vivid translation of the Roman poet’s mini-epic; with members of 12, Pink Witch (Main Point Books, 2024), a collection critiquing the film Barbie in dialogue with the Witches of Scotland; and, with Colin Herd, Nicky Melville, Iain Morrison and Maria Sledmere, NOT JUST A NY QUINCUNX (Mermaid Hotel, 2024).

David Hopkins’ Four Wee Poetry Performances is published by Gnobilis Press, 2026, (ISBN: 978-1-0369-5384-3), price: £15, contains 44 poems selected from Hopkins’s poetic output to date, presented across four themed booklets in a slip case. Each booklet represents a ‘wee performance’ and was designed accordingly by Hopkins in close collaboration with book artist Alastair Noble.