‘The Green Room’ – launched at Readings

Ambience and camaraderie – all in the swim

Jo Langdon launched The Green Room by Cath Kenneally, Readings 24 August 2026

We had great fun getting together yesterday to celebrate The Green Room and its author Cath Kenneally. These poems began as a response to artist Chris De Rosa’s exhibition ‘SeaWeeding’ and grew into a ‘paean to all the seas and waterways of [Cath’s] acquaintance’ – so we were all immersed. (And admired Chris De Rosa’s image that became the cover concept).

First up Alex Sutcliffe read some fine poems written in response to Cath’s work.

Jo read and reflected… predicting that these poems will leave us thinking of our own experiences with and relationships to water, our personal and political points of reference…

These poems invite us in—as you might guess, into green spaces, green bodies, of water: the seas, lakes and rivers of this blue planet, and the associations and perceptions we as human readers bring and form in response to them. Dedicated ‘to merfolk everywhere’, the bodies of water Cath forms, shapes, recalls and represents here in language also invite us to embody variously uncanny experiences, familiar and strange, charged with dreamlike, otherworldly qualities, where we are, in the poet’s words, ‘held between earth and air / in green-gold, dispersed, fractured light / shot through with darts of sun’

Then Cath delighted us in reading poems – some serious, some whimsical – and we all mingled and chatted, and then dived out into the evening in Carlton, most of us for a bowl of pasta and glass of red wine to celebrate.

Introducing the Liquid Amber range