Launch reading with John Challis, Frank Ormsby and Lawrence Sail
Do join Bloodaxe for this launch event for new June 2026 titles by John Challis, Frank Ormsby and Lawrence Sail.
All three poets will be celebrating the publication of their new books, with John Challis and Lawrence Sail by reading live from their books. Frank Ormsby draws on his experience of living with Parkinson's Disease in his recent work and is unable to take part, but has been able to make audio recordings to be played during this event with screen-shared poems from his book. The post-reading discussion with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, will feature John Challis and Lawrence Sail along with Frank Ormsby's friend, the writer and broadcaster Malachi O'Donohue, who made the audio recordings.
This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/6OitDbheZ8A
If you register to attend on TicketTailor you will receive an event link reminder by email by midday the day before the event. For those who can't make it live, the reading will be available on YouTube afterwards via the same YouTube link: https://youtube.com/live/6OitDbheZ8A
Watch live or later via YouTube.
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links.
Lawrence Sail: Double Takes
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/double-takes-1399
John Challis: The Green Parcel
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-green-parcel-1397
Frank Ormsby: The Tumbling Paddy
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-tumbling-paddy-1398
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Lawrence Sail: Double Takes
Twinning is well embedded in Lawrence Sail’s family: himself the son of a twin, he also has a twin sister and – youngest of his four children – twin daughters. His collection's title Double Takes reflects the poems’ central concern with many aspects of duality – whether manifested in the context of human relations, translations, ‘the moment saved from time’ or the touchstone of mortality. In some instances, juxtapositions and counterpoints bring affinities to light; in others, distance and difference. A number of the poems address the political and the public: the plight of refugees, a photo of Putin beside Gorbachev’s coffin, Brecht’s take on the ways of the world. Others confront the hard consequences of illness.
Most of all, these are poems that pay proper attention to their subjects, and which amount to an appreciation of beauty and balance, however precarious, as in ‘Moving Out’, where it is only being ‘on the brink of removal’ that makes it possible to ‘engage with the ins and outs’, and to benefit from ‘the startle of those double takes / which reinterpret truth’.
Lawrence Sail's retrospective, Waking Dreams: New & Selected Poems, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, was published by Bloodaxe in 2010, and followed by his later collections The Quick (2015), Guises (2020), and now, Double Takes (2026).
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John Challis: The Green Parcel
The rural terrain of John Challis’s second collection provides a new lens for exploring history, class and work, our relationship to the natural world, and cycles of growth and decay. Much of his debut collection The Resurrectionists concerned working lives in the city: his father a London cabbie, his grandfather a market porter. Here his focus shifts to a crumbling stately home in Northumberland brought to life through the voices of the grounds as well as those who inhabit it and maintain it. London is at a distance. We find ourselves beyond, in backyards, on motorways, in fields, searching for the green patch in Kent, where an East End family picked hops in the summer.
Despatches from the early years of fatherhood reflect on ageing, loss and patience. Poems set in the American west consider the idea of freedom. And on the eve of his execution, thief and folk hero Jack Sheppard flees into the forest of his mind. Confronting the tension between wanting to belong and the desire to escape, these poems acknowledge and reckon with the people and places that haunt us.
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Frank Ormsby: The Tumbling Paddy
Frank Ormsby’s eighth collection of poems is, on the whole, a playful book which constantly surprises us with serious themes. History is the word and history the image, whether as in a dream about Auschwitz or a portrait of the History Club on its annual outing. Then spirit of place is richly imagined, whether in the form of ‘Juggy’, the ‘simpleton’ sleepwalking through the estate, or the humanised tumbling paddy, both clumsy celebrant and instrument of refinement among the furrows.
Elsewhere in the collection, Frank Ormsby demonstrates his skill with the resonant short poem. These pieces, mostly in haiku form, constitute a running tribute to the Japanese and Chinese poets he claims as his ‘oriental fathers’.
Frank Ormsby is by turn movingly elegiac and wryly determined to allow death its dominion in the face of mortality and his experience of Parkinson’s disease.
[15 May 2026]
