The Victor Hugo Centre celebrated World Poetry Day with a poetry reading event hosted at the Writer’s Block bookshop.
The event involved twenty-one poems recited by eleven readers including Lieutenant Governor Richard Cripwell and three students from The Ladies’ College.
Larry Malcic, chair of the Victor Hugo Centre, introduced the evening, and said this about the event: ‘The Victor Hugo Centre will be a place for performance and creativity. This poetry evening is a showcase for both of those things, the sort of event that the Centre will cater for on a regular basis.’
Victor Hugo wrote 153,000 lines of verse during his life giving the readers plenty of material to choose from. Poems shared included Sur une Barricade, Demain des L’aube, Unité and a selection of poems from other writers such as Charles Baudelaire and E.E. Cummings.
Tony Gallienne, a director of the Centre, who compèred the evening said: “As well as a novelist, dramatist and social campaigner Victor Hugo was a great poet, with the success of his collection Les Contemplations allowing him to buy Hauteville House. Locally Hugo’s poetry is not very well known, and this was an opportunity to address that and start to increase awareness and appreciation of his poetic work.”
Lieutenant Governor Richard Cripwell said: “I’m hugely supportive of the Centre and I believe this project offers so much, not just to the artistic community in Guernsey but is a wonderful draw for visitors. Nights like this are excellent for the community and encourage people to think more about Victor Hugo and what he did for Guernsey.”
