The Writers of Wales Database

GARDNER, ANGELA

Email: lighttrappress_at_gmail.com (insert the @)
Website: http://www.light-trap.net/angelagardner/index.html

Angela Gardner was born in Cardiff and educated at Llanishen High School and Cardiff College of Art (now UWIC). She currently lives in Brisbane, Australia where she completed a Masters degree in Visual Art at Queensland College of Art. She is the winner of the Bauhinia/Idiom 23 Prize for Poetry (2004) and the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize for Unpublished Poetry (2006). Her first book, Parts of Speech (Selected Poetry), was published by University of Queensland Press in 2007.

In 2007 she was also awarded a Churchill Fellowship that enabled her to travel to the USA and UK to learn letterpress (text) printing for fine press publications and look at poetry and printmaker collaborations. Angela is a partner in light-trap press (www.light-trap.net) that publishes the on-line poetry journal foam:e (www.foame.org), now in its seventh year. Light-trap press also publishes print collaborations between printmakers and poets. The latest of these collaborations, to publish two limited edition fine press books (The Night Ladder with linocuts by Lisa Pullen and twelve labours with etchings by Gwenn Tasker), received funding from Arts Queensland under their Visual Arts & Crafts Strategy grant scheme.

Her latest book, Views of the Hudson (Shearsman UK 2009) was written in New York during the Churchill Fellowship. In 2008 she was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Literature Board residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Co. Monaghan in Ireland. Her poetry has appeared in journals, on radio and cdrom. Her work has been anthologised in Small Packages 8 anthology, New Century Press, 2004 and In the Telling Cinnamon Press Wales 2009.

Angela is a practising visual artist with works in national and international public collections. She is currently interested in introducing poetry into large-scale public art commissions. Her first collaboration of this kind with artist Ian Friend is due to be shown on a 50 metre wide billboard (the entire side of a building) in downtown Brisbane Australia from September through to December 2009, in daily view of 700,000 commuters. Angela is a Member of Academi.

Reviews:
With respect to Parts of Speech (University of Queensland Press, 2007): 

“…The title poem… is stunning in its use of language, in its quirky repetitions and energetic enjambment…There is something edgy and explosive about these poems..”
Overland

“…Angela Gardner’s Parts of Speech shows what a substantial first book of poetry is all about...”
Cordite

“...There are many astonishing moments in these poems... Angela Gardner’s first collection is incredibly graceful and thoughtful...”
Jacket


Selected Publications:
Parts of Speech (University of Queensland Press, 2007)
Views of the Hudson (Shearsman Press, 2009)

Contributed to:
Postcard Poems Poetry (co-writer) (University of Queensland, 2003)
Idiom23 (contributor) (Central Queensland University, 2004)
Small Packages 8 (contributor) (New Century Press, 2004)
papertiger#4 (CDRom) (contributor) (Papertiger Soi3, 2004)
In the Telling (contributor) (Cinnamon Press, 2009)




Views of the Hudson (Shearsman Press, 2009)

Written during a visit to New York in 2008, Views of the Hudson explores ideas of belonging and displacement. In a flood of images from this overcrowded information-rich city it weaves a narrative that suggests both the intoxication and dangers of believing in Promised Lands. Views of the Hudson shows the life of a city that is complicated and enriched for being at once both sacred and profane.

To purchase this title from Shearsman Press please click on the front cover