Daughters Wives Resilient Lives - Poets of the Long Table

The poets will be reading some of the work in the publication and some new work, and if there is time will take questions afterwards.

For the last two years, Kathryn Metcalfe, Mairi Murphy, Morag Smith and Lesley Traynor, four poets with strong connections to Paisley, have continued to meet through a pandemic online. They discussed their lives raised in working class Scotland by women who had few opportunities in life but who nonetheless were strong and loving and who passed on their own rich stories and memories. Ordinary, yet extraordinary these women inspired the four poets with their bravery and resilience in the face of famine, war, and pandemic. Their strength was drawn on, giving them courage to keep going through the dark times of Covid 19. If they had survived, so could they.

These poems are inspired by those women who have gone before, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, daughters. As an anthology, the poems take on new layers of meaning, they talk to one another, are able to speak freely. Their voices are no longer hidden.