Masters: Beneath and Beyond the Brushstrokes

From John Singer Sargent to Francis Bacon and Keith Haring – covering romantic landscapes and surreal portraits – Masters curates a gallery of writing in response to paintings by queer men. Mark Ward’s voice inks that of the artist, the subject, and the viewer across poems exploring desire, grief, shame, defiance and surrender.

Tender and daring, Masters goes in search of a shared queer male history across the past century, and invites us to look more deeply at the worlds beneath and beyond the brushstrokes.

Join Mark Ward, as he reads from and discusses the creation of Masters with fellow poet, Paul Maddern.

Mark Ward is the author of Nightlight (Salmon Poetry, 2023) and six pamphlets, the most recent of which is Masters (The Emma Press, 2025). His work has been widely published at home and abroad. He is a three-time bursary awardee of The Arts Council of Ireland. He founded, and for ten years edited, the LGBTQ+ poetry journal, Impossible Archetype. A second full-length collection, Real Estate, will be published by Salmon Poetry in May 2026.

Paul Maddern has four collections with Templar Poetry, the latest being The Tipping Line, and he edited Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Lifeboat Press, 2021). He's the recipient of several ACNI awards and he was a James Merrill House Writing Fellow (2023). His poem, Effacé, is studied on the GCSE syllabus and he is the first poet to have received three Bermuda Government Literary Awards. Website: https://www.paulmaddern.com/