BARROW poet Kate Davis headlines this month's much awaited Poem and a Pint midwinter extravaganza.

Staged at Ulverston's Laurel and Hardy Museum on Saturday, February 23, Kate presents parts of her new book, The Girl Who Forgets How To Walk. More of a performance than a reading, Kate's work been received enthusiastically by audiences in Cumbria and elsewhere in different forms as it has developed. Her appearance at the 2018 Kendal Poetry Festival was deemed as one of the most popular events in the festival programme.

Kate was diagnosed with polio at the age of four and her poems use the music of language and a variety of poetic forms to explore her illness and how it changes her relationship with even the landscape within which she lives. The first section of her collection The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk - published by Penned in the Margins in June last year - moves from a geological and analytic engagement with the landscape to a close first person engagement with the perils of shifting sands and sink holes. The second section focuses on her illness, her slow, incomplete recovery and the difficulties of a child trying to avoid being scorned as a cripple.

As usual for a PP gig the poetry and prose will flow, and Kate will be supported by poems from the Poem and a Pint Committee, music from duo Sarsaparilla, a heady mix of classic covers and original compositions courtesy of vocalist, Caroline Benson, and guitarist, Ray Dowling, plus the inimitable Ross Baxter will be MC.