In partnership with the University of Essex’s Literature, Film and Theatre Studies department, the East Anglian environmental poet and LiFTS alumni, Eliza O’Toole, together with Shearsman Books and Muscaliet Press, presents her modern pastoral, ‘Buying the Farm (a georgics of sorts)’, and her elegiac paean to moths that is her chapbook ‘Red fifty five’.

Eliza will be reading from both books, plus a Q&A with publishers Shearsman Books and Muscaliet Press.

Eliza’s poems have appeared in Shearsman magazine, The Rialto, Tears in the Fence, and in the Poetry Review.  She has published The Dropping of Petals (Muscaliet Press, 2021), A Cranic of Ordinaries (Shearsman, 2024), Buying the Farm (a georgics of sorts) (Shearsman, 2025) and her chapbook,  Red Fifty Five: The Unpinning of Moths (Muscaliet Press, 2025). She was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year 2023/24, and was nominated as a finalist in the Poet Laureate’s Laurel Prize for environmental poetry in 2025.

About Buying the Farm (a georgics of sorts), Professor and poet Chris McCully said, ‘In their density, their rawness, and in their brilliant uses of the English language as a ground on and from which earth can be newly sung, these extraordinary poems rival Manley Hopkins in their ability to enact what they describe, or lament, or love.’

The poet Rebecca Goss said ‘In her unique and captivating voice, Eliza O’Toole’s new collection portrays complex legacies of farming. These poems question concepts of territory, ownership, labour and habitat across centuries, where an ‘aftermath’ can bring new growth or devastating consequences. Buying the Farm provides an astonishing, vital recording of East Anglian landscape, written in poems of agile beauty.’

This event will take place in the Lakeside Theatre Café and bar, everyone welcome, no booking required.