A POEM and A Pint's next vocal venture is a proper prizewinner.

Coming up on Saturday (September 21, 7.30pm) at Ulverston's Laurel and Hardy Museum, among the star turns will be this year’s Second Poem and a Pint competition winners who will offer chapter and verse on their carefully crafted pieces.

Many of the winners and commended poets were from Cumbria: Ulverston's Clare Proctor - who teaches at Kirkbie Kendal School - was the winner of the Cumbrian Poet's Prize award. Maggie Reed, who has Cumbrian connections, landed the Poem and a Pint main prize. Among those highly commended were Kerry Darbyshire, who lives near Kendal, and Lancaster's Barbara Hickson. Clare, Barbara and Kerry are all members of Brewery Poets.

Guest poet for Saturday's grand gathering will be highly regarded Carrie Etter, who was also this year's Poem and a Pint competition judge.

Carrie was born and brought up on the prairies in Normal, Illinois. However, for the past 10 years or so she's been based at Bath.

At the age of 19 she bought a one way train ticket to California and straight away became involved in poetry, founding Out Loud: A Monthly of Los Angeles Poetry Events, which she co-edited for five years. Her hunger for education began with her taking night classes at Santa Monica College and, unexpectedly, ended up finishing her work on a PhD across the Atlantic in London, in the summer of 2001. Since 2004 she has been reader in creative writing at Bath Spa University. She has published four poetry chapbooks, one collection of prose, and her fourth full collection, The Weather in Normal, was published in last autumn by Seren Books.

In her 2016 chapbook, Scar, Carrie explored the effects of global warming on her home state of Illinois apparently "with typical verve and originality," in a single long poem which became the backbone of the third section of her 2018 collection. Although the book’s main concern is climate change and its results - for example the greater occurrence of extreme weather and the loss of species, and the human responsibility for these - its structuring into three sections, in the first of which the juxtaposing of her father's critical illness with the 2007 blizzard that paralysed Illinois, pits the fragility of the human body against the power of the weather, demands a personal, almost visceral response from the reader. Extreme weather endangered her father in a very real way: the doctor could not come. This part of the book gives the reader a vivid impression of the haunting beauty of the prairie, of its cornfields stretching to the horizons, while at the same time man’s technologies and man-made contrivances crumble against the supremacy of the weather.

The second section of the book explores the effect of the loss of the family home in the long poem Afterlife. The house is a place of memory and of dream, an upbringing in a house crowded with sisters and then with her sisters’ children.

In the third part, Carrie’s pent up anger sometimes explodes, subverting the structures of the poems themselves and mirroring the unpredictability of the more dangerous world man has created, while at the same time lamenting the fate of the Kamer Blue butterfly and turning the sound of cicadas, which opened the collection, into a lament for their own passing.

Carrie creates powerful poetry and her readings, lightened by glimpses of dark humour, are always moving events.

MC for Saturday's PP event will be distinguished poet Kim Moore with tunes from Lancaster a capella group Sass: Sue Keenan, Anni Tracy, Sue Holden and Sara Mellen, who provide new lyrics to well known songs, often reflecting aspects of their own lives. Their humour can be political, sassy, sweary, hilarious but is always honest and often revealing.

Pay at the door.