Serie Barford and Glenn Colquhoun: Working Class Heroes

Working class heroes and poets Serie Barford and Glenn Colquhoun celebrate their working class roots as part of the Going West Oblivion Express as it steams to Helensville Station. Passengers along for the ride were entertained and charmed by this witty pairing of two of New Zealand’s finest performance poets. It is pure working class gold, sprinkled with a West Auckland flavour, as they celebrate their whānau, friends, and community with poems about ceramic swans, the knicker factory, bullrush, and bog filled cars, grapevines and the alchemy of Assid Corban’s orchids. Both Barford and Colquhoun are long-time friends of the Going West Writers Festival and have been regular guests throughout the years. Serie Barford is a poet and short fiction writer of European and Polynesian descent, with a background in performance poetry. She has published four poetry collections: Plea to the Spanish Lady (Hard Echo Press, 1985), Glass Canisters (Hard Echo Press, 1989), Tapa Talk (Huia, 2007), and Entangled Islands (Anahera Press, 2015). Her work is also published in multiple journals and anthologies. Glenn Colquhoun is a doctor, and an award-winning poet and children’s writer. His first collection The Art of Walking Upright (Steele Roberts, 1999) won the Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry award at the Montana Book Awards (2000). Playing God (Hammersmith Press, 2002), his third collection, won the poetry section of the same awards in 2003, as well as the Readers’ Choice Award that year. His latest book Late Love, (Bridget Williams Books, 2016) is an adaptation of a speech given at the APAC health conference in 2013, outlining the relationship in his life between poetry and medicine.