Church hosts tribute to poet Frances Horovitz

1:56pm Thursday 2nd October 2008

TWO of the UK’s best-loved poets, Gillian Clarke and Anne Stevenson, will be in Orcop Church on Saturday for a reading in tribute to their close friend, the poet Frances Horovitz, who died of cancer 25 years ago and is buried in the Churchyard at Orcop.

Gillian Clarke is the National Poet of Wales and, with Frances, contributed to The Kilpeck Anthology in 1981, “sisters cooling our wrists/in the stump of a Celtic water stoup”.

Anne Stevenson is an American poet who has lived in this country most of her life and was one of the trio of poets who founded the Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye.

She has written of Kilpeck and the Black Mountains as well as of the Hadrian’s Wall country she shared with Frances Horovitz when they both happened to move north in the early 1980s.

Willow Song, her lament for Frances, is regarded as one of the finest in the English language.

Tickets for A Celebration of Frances Horovitz cost £7 and will be available on the door. All proceeds will go towards the upkeep of Orcop Church.

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