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University of Sussex Media Release.
. New collection features University of Sussex poets

21 June 2001
For immediate release

University of Sussex student Sarah Wardle and staff member Ros Barber are both featured in a new collection of poetry.

Anvil New Poets 3, which contains ten poems by Sarah and nine by Ros, refers to Sarah's "light, formal style and love of rhyme ... set against a hint of darkness and wicked wit", which is "informed by a love of classics and philosophy [and] by the politics of love affairs".

"I am very happy to be in the book," says Sarah, one of over 100 poets to be considered for inclusion. "I was approached by one of the book's editors who asked me to submit a manuscript and I eventually made the shortlist."

In 1999 Sarah won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for new poet of the year. It was at the award ceremony that Sarah first met Ros and the two now attend a monthly poetry workshop in London, also frequented by poets such as Hugo Williams, whose most recent collection of poetry, Billy's Rain, won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2000, and John Stammers, who has recently published his first collection of poetry, Panoramic Lounge-bar.

Sarah's favourite poets include Michael Longley (who won the T.S. Eliot Prize earlier this year for his most recent collection, The Weather in Japan), the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (who won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature) and Simon Armitage (who last year published Killing Time, the result of a commission to mark the new millennium).

The Anvil New Poets 3 says that Ros' poems "isolate the unspoken, often dark passions lurking within the mundane or commonplace". Ros recently spent a period as poet-in-residence at a barber's shop in Hove.

Notes for editors

Anvil New Poets 3, edited by Roddy Lumsden & Hamish Ironside, is published by Anvil Press Poetry at £9.95. ISBN: 0-85646-283-7.

For further information, please contact Peter Simmons or Alison Field, University of Sussex, Tel. 01273 678609, Fax 01273 877456, P.J.Simmons@sussex.ac.uk or A.Field@sussex.ac.uk.

To receive University of Sussex releases by email, please email information@sussex.ac.uk. Include the name of your media outlet, your title, postal address, phone and fax numbers, and the headline of this news release.

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