Events this month at the Scottish Poetry Library

Head Lines: Poetry and Medicine

St Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh, 10 March, 6pm, free Two medical professionals discuss poetry’s place in the world of medicine and care. Dr John Gillies, co-director of the University of Edinburgh’s Compassion Initiative, will talk about Tools of the Trade, an anthology gifted to every newly graduated doctor in Scotland, and poet Ken Cockburn will explain Living Voices, a project taking poetry into care homes to work with dementia sufferers.

Eileen Myles

Scottish Poetry Library, 16 March 7pm, £8 (£6) Prolific and widely renowned poet, novelist, and essayist Eileen Myles is a trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work, according to the New York Review of Books, “set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match.” Afterglow (a dog memoir), Myles’ first foray into memoir, paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of a beloved confidant: a pit bull called Rosie. Join Myles for the launch.

Ctrl Alt Del with Heir of the Cursed

Scottish Poetry Library, 24 March 2pm, free

Join the young women from Youth Community Support Agency’s group, Ctrl Alt Del, along with two of their tutors, poet Marjorie Gill and singer-songwriter Heir of the Cursed, as they share work generated in a project supported by the Scottish Poetry Library. Ctrl Alt Del is YCSA’S reboot programme to reduce social exclusion and poverty. The programme aims to support and empower young BME people to take control of their lives, identify barriers to themselves and their community and, in deleting those barriers, find alternatives towards positive destinations. ■