The Nerve Centre Profiles: Val Walsh.

Val Walsh has been performing her poems in the North West for 7 years. As well as being a regular at Liverpool’s Dead Good Poets Society (DGPS), she has performed at Liverpool’s Poetry Café (both at Costa Café and the Bluecoat); at various local community and political events, such as the Peace & Ecology Festival and May Day Festival; as well as at the Bluecoat during the 2010 Arabic Arts Festival. As a result, two of her poems are to be translated into Arabic and published simultaneously in English in an online Arabic newsletter. For 3 years she has also contributed to Liverpool’s annual Poetry Marathon, as part of National Poetry Day.

Together with poet Anne Candlin, and on behalf of exiled Palestinian poet, Nahida Yasin, long-term resident in Liverpool, Val has performed Nahida’s poems at various venues and events in the North West, for example organised by Friends of Palestine, CND and the Arabic Arts Festival.

She has organised women’s poetry events for International Women’s Day and Merseyside Women’s Movement (MWM) for 4 years. Two years ago she was responsible for bringing together a group of local women poets to create a performance for the multidisciplinary and multimedia arts festival, PAX, held at The Black-E, with lighting projections by artist, Hambi Haralambous, and harp accompaniment by Stan Ambrose. Out of this emerged the idea of EMBRACE, a loose association of diverse women poets in Liverpool, who perform integrated sequences of their poems as a creative act of collaboration and community. 

Her poems have been published in a number of magazines over the last 6 years, including LAPIDUS: Creative Words for Health and Wellbeing, and Liverpool’s NERVE, as well as online (e.g. 2 poems as part of the ‘wall’ of 800 poems to mark Liverpool’s 800^th Anniversary as a city in 2008).

Rooted in women’s lives and experience, they are pre-occupied with the personal / political dilemmas of living and being: problems of survival, well-being and intimacy; the ethical and political issues attendant on the struggle to ‘be human’: to avoid abuse, exploitation and complicity; to mark and challenge injustice; as well as celebrate our loving and the power of the natural world.  Poetry digs deep and involves exposure, of self and other. Sometimes this also produces humour.