Asher hoyles biography
Poet Asher on school, sound systems and Shelley
Asher Hoyles. Photo: Angela Cobbinah
WITH her booming voice, ready smile and sheer solid presence it is hard to associate stage jitters with performance poet Asher Hoyles.
But that is what has always accompanied her as she steps up to face her audience, from her first show in a West End café bar to Westminster Abbey and Glastonbury.
“I am usually a bag of nerves and scared out of my wits,” she laughs. “But once I start I am all right.”
Today she is in particularly ebullient form. After composing and performing poetry for more than 25 years, she is celebrating the publication of her first compilation, Rise Up The Low, Bring Down The Mighty, a title inspired as much by Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy as by Marley’s Small Axe, two of the many influences that inform her work.
The book and two accompanying CDs comprise 52 poems whose subject matter is equally diverse – anything from her mother’s shopping list to the invasion of Ir Asher hoyles poems.