Dave Urwin will be guest poet at Cardigan’s Cellar Bards on Friday, 10 October.

Dave has been writing poetry since he was a teenager and this will be something of a homecoming as he was joint host of Cellar Bards until stepping down this spring.

He has published three collections, writes on a wide range of topics and loves performing live.

For the last two years Dave has been working on his magnum opus, a “poem for voices”, which was inspired by a radio production of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and is now close to completion. Recent renditions of snippets from this work have had audiences rolling with laughter.

He has performed at the Laugharne Festival fringe, and once had John Cooper Clarke in the audience in Brown’s Hotel (the famous Dylan Thomas watering-hole!) who gave Dave the thumbs-up and called his work “Fabulous!”

Menna Elfyn has compared Dave’s work to Wendell Berry and wrote of his third collection, The Parrot in the Mango Tree, “so many different paces and rhythms and unexpected lanes and lines. You can be proud of this book…it’s a great volume.”

A Cellar Bards spokesperson said: “Dave was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2021, but the poetry continues to flow and he invites audience to shake along with him ‘in passion, laughter, excitement, empathy and madness!’”

Open mic slots are available to anyone who wants to share their spoken words. Sign up at the door.

There is a charge of £5 for entry, which includes a raffle and opportunity to enter your work for possible publication in the first Cellar Bards Anthology.

Cellar Bards meet on the second Friday of the month, welcoming new and experienced poets, rappers, and writers of flash fiction, story-telling, episodes of longer fiction and non-fiction and even song.

The Cellar, Quay Street, opens at 7.30pm.