Launching the Spring Anthology 2025

A Zoom event at 7pm on Wednesday 23rd July.

Spring has come and gone, and our 2025 Spring Competitions have flowered into ‘Can Spring be Far Behind?’ and two new collections by the joint winners of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize. As always, we’re going to launch the books with Zoom online events where we can celebrate the poems and their authors in their own voices.

Long ago (pre-covid, in other words) we would hold launches in the Poetry Society Café in London. Poets who had time (and money) to take a weekend break in the city used to converge from all corners of Britain on the meeting room in Enderton Street, to meet and greet and read their poems to each other and their friends and families.

The Poetry Society café has re-opened but it’s much more expensive since refurbishment, and so are travel and hotels. We prefer to continue with the more inclusive method of hosting the contributors to the anthology in an online event to celebrate the publication of their poems, using our Zoom account.

So this week all 44 contributors to ‘Can Spring be Far Behind’ have been invited to our Zoom room to read their work. Jeremy Loynes, the competition judge, will be there with his report on his process — it was a demanding task, reading almost 1700 poems, but as he will tell you, a rewarding one for a poet.

There will be places for some listeners other than those who are invited by the poets themselves. If you would like to join us, let me know by email (dempseyandwindle@gmail.com) and we’ll send you the link if there is space.

The date of the Anthology launch is Wednesday 23rd July and we begin at 7pm. It’s free.

The Anthology is available to order from our website at www.dempseyandwindle.com. More information about the book is here