Edward Ragg (Selwyn ’99) reads from his new collection Holding Unfailing (Cinnamon Press, 2017):
Date: 11th February 2017
Time: 6.45 p.m.
Venue: Drama Studio, Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP
Drinks: Wine and soft drinks will be available
RSVP: If you would like to attend, please RSVP to Edward Ragg on edward.ragg@cantab.net
Praise for Holding Unfailing (2017):
Intriguing, supple poems that range across the world and across the landscapes of the mind. – Sarah Howe
This collection has for its central focus scenes from contemporary China, observing with detachment and direct emotional intent those personal landscapes which fan out from Ragg’s experiences of a country undergoing profound change. Such landscapes and the burdening memories accompanying them create poems of concentrated philosophical energy. They search and question. Ragg explores paths and places across a world shot through with colour. Yet he reins back from the expected celebratory note, in order to sift truth from falsehood, to travel from height to abyss. This is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection. – Penelope Shuttle
About the Author:
Edward Ragg was born in Stockton-on-Tees, England, in 1976 and, since 2007, has lived in Beijing, China. A former scholar of Keble College, Oxford and graduate scholar of Selwyn College, Cambridge, Ragg won the 2012 Cinnamon Poetry Award and his first volume of poetry was A Force That Takes (Cinnamon Press, 2013). His new collection, Holding Unfailing (Cinnamon Press, 2017), investigates contemporary China and questions of travel and identity.
Ragg’s poetry has been anthologised in the 2014 Forward Book of Poetry (Faber & Faber, 2013), Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Eyewear Publishing/Cinnamon Press, 2012), Jericho & Other Stories & Poems (Cinnamon Press, 2012), Visiting Wallace: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens (Iowa University Press, 2009) and New Poetries IV (Carcanet Press, 2007). Other poems have appeared in Aesthetica, Acumen, Agenda, Cordite Poetry Review, Critical Quarterly, Envoi, Orbis, Other Poetry, Papercuts, Poetry Quarterly, PN Review, Seam, Spittoon, The New Writer and Three Line Poetry.
A former Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford, Ragg is also author of Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction (Cambridge University Press, 2010), co-editor of Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (Palgrave, 2008) and is an Editorial Board Member of The Wallace Stevens Journal. A writer on wine, he has published articles in the world’s leading wine journals and several publications within mainland China as well as online. Ragg is currently Associate Professor in English at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and is co-founder, with his wife Fongyee Walker MW (Master of Wine, Queens’ ’99), of Dragon Phoenix Wine Consulting (est. 2007).