I have a new poetry crush, and her name is Ella Frears.
Frears was introduced to the Norfolk and Norwich Festival Speakeasy audience by TOAST host Lewis Buxton as, rather unfairly, poetry’s kindly aunt – a label swiftly withdrawn and even more robustly disproved by her poems.
Her set drew from her first collection Shine, Darling and 2024 extended poem Goodlord, both of which received nominations in the Forward Prize, and it’s easy to see why she drew the attention of the judges.
Her poems are spiky, funny, evocative, and unusual – sketches that from nowhere conjure up quirky worlds and their equally eccentric inhabitants. Maybe aunts have changed, but I can’t imagine mine writing a poem called Fucking in Cornwall.
We hear of a lover that abandons her partner on the roof of their house, merrily holding dinner parties while not entirely sure whether they’ve figured their own way down; a man obsessed, charmingly but unnervingly, with the commercial sand business; another who takes mini golf far too seriously – “death is the final hole”.
Cultural norms, like the association of women with the moon, are challenged and exposed through a sort of “exorcism”, and our easy reliance on technology is given a understand but slightly deranged riposte.
Her words are almost breezily delivered but chosen with immense care, with not a wasted syllable.
Support was from Brandon Webb, very much more at the performance end of things, with boldy delivered tales of Facebook groups and food porn (“Man I Love Food”), and TOAST host Buxton, with a rapid autobiography of poems charting his life from disruptive child to new father, taking unlikely inspiration on husbandry from the throes of a zombie apocalypse. Sometimes you just have to be there.
- The Norfolk and Norwich Festival continues until 25 May 2025.
