Local poets Sophie Herxheimer and Stephen Duncan are to perform Berlin Blues – Velkom to Inklandt, at an event organised by Friends of Brixton Library.
Recalling earlier generations of refugees, they will read from Berlin Blues, poems by Beata Duncan edited by her son Stephen Duncan, and Sophie Herxheimer’s Velkom to Inklandt
Stephen Duncan writes: “Written in the last decades of Beata Duncan’s long life, my mother’s posthumous collection, Berlin Blues, can be read as both a family saga and a bitter sweet reverie for Berlin, the city of her birth.
“Her poems recreate her life with her psychoanalyst mother and her playwright father, evoking the dynamic cultural world of the Weimar decade and the stars of the Berlin theatre and cabaret, before the rise of Hitler. Beata emigrated to England aged 12 in 1934 and was a popular poet and performer of her poetry in London.”
Sophie Herxheimer’s first full poetry collection, Velkom to Inklandt, is a sequence of dramatic monologues written in the voice of Liesel, a German Jewish refugee who arrived in London in 1938.
The poems are written phonetically and, at first sight, look completely foreign. The author recreates sounds that were so familiar to her growing up in London in the 1960s and 70s.
“This is how my ear remembers the way my paternal grandparents spoke.” she says.
The poems document Liesel’s arrival in London, her attempts to fit in and make her home here, as well as on her previous life in Germany.
The readings are at the library on 31 January from 7 to 9pm.
