The Brooke’s Bar Review – First Issue

Saturday Books Poetry Breakfast takes performance into print.

The Saturday Books Poetry Breakfast has a history. 2018 was the year the idea took root – the inspiration of Ronaldo Hare, featured elsewhere on this website. In early 2019 a series of lunchtime sessions were held, first at the neighbouring Glasshouse restaurant, and then at pubs with function rooms or outdoor, while the present Reading Room at the bookshop was also put to use. Laura Jane Round and Johnny ‘Mogs’ Morris were performers from those days who are still with us now. Subsequently there was Lockdown, after which the event was reconfigured as a Breakfast, its eventual resting-place the Brooke’s Bar and Bistro.

Three years ago I dismantled an old copy-printer, abandoned there by a community group that had used the place for storage. Taking the pieces for scrap, I wished I’d been able to fix the machine, such a perfect low-energy means to low-cost publication. I had long dreamed of the bookshop having its own hard-copy sheet. These aspirations were revived when people suggested we make an anthology of poems read at the Breakfast. I thought, as a compromise, we might incorporate the previous month’s poetry into some form of newsletter. Hence the birth of the Brooke’s Review.

The introduction to the first issue ran thus:

They are reproduced in this rudimentary publication because we at Saturday Books naturally believe in all spoken-word art having a literary form. The one form does not surpass the other; there is no ’hierarchy’, that would privilege the print over the voice – rather that they are complementary expressions. A performed poem can shock, engage and move; the remote reading-back is far more than a recollection of emotion. It is rather an internalisation of the verse, where it lodges deep in the consciousness, from which a phrase can arise unexpectedly, in all its beauty. In other words, the verse has become part of a shared culture, with its own dynamism.

The publication has been sustained, at least, as far as Issue No.2. Printing both times has been through the generosity of establishments. We don’t know the future, but we surely could do with a copy-printer of our own.

Brooke’s Review Issue 1 (PDF)

Brooke’s Review Issue 2 (PDF)