No literary festival would be complete without a a contribution from today's poets and Oxford's contemporary poetry will represented by the talents of Jenny Lewis and Sasha Dugdale. Over the years Jenny Lewis has staged countless performances of her work and this time she and her fellow poet will be at Christ Church for a reading.

Jenny's first collection, entitled Fathom, has been published by Carcenet, a publishing house which began life in 1962 as a literary magazine publishing poetry, short fiction and criticism. Carcenet acquired Oxford University's fine poetry list in 1999. Sasha's second collection, The Estate, is also published by Carcanet.

Jenny says that Carcenet have taken infinite care with her book.

"They committed themselves to making it the best - a good editor makes all the difference," she said.

Jenny's poems have ranged from stories of a young medieval nun living in an enclosed cell to tales of a gypsy dancer who was in love with an Indian prince.

Her collection this time concentrates on a woman's experience of loss and recovery. The work exorcises the ghost of her unknown father, the young South Wales Borderer who died when she was just a baby. The sense of incompleteness which he bequeathed to his child haunts her even now, which may be why many of the poems that touch on her father are so evocative.

She wrote the title poem, Fathom, at three in the morning, while revising for the finals of her degree in 2000. It was at a time when she seemed overwhelmed by the was depressed by the relentless academic pressure and felt as if she was swimming in the ocean beside a huge, dark oil tanker that was blocking the light and threatening to crush her.

"I think it was a cry from the depths of my subconscious, to let my creative juices start flowing again," she said, adding that the time we have on earth is so short, it's a pity to waste too much of it not doing the thing you feel you were born to.

Three subsequent poems were written last year when Jenny decided to get away from it all and rented a cottage in Wales.

"It was a really tiny cottage, but it was in the middle of nowhere and overlooked the sea. When I first got there I just slept and slept. Then after three days of sleeping I got myself together and wrote. I wrote to my father, my mother, my lover. Just ten minutes at a time.

"After scribbling away for days, I distilled all I had written down to three poems, which I added to the ones already written, some of which had taken months, even years, to complete."

Jenny has no idea where the reflective poems come from.

"It's no Blake's vision, but the urge to write is a hunger. It's there and you can't fight it. If you deny it, it makes you ill. Poetry is also important to me because it puts us in touch with our intuition, the collective unconsciousness and our deeper selves." She admits that form and structure are important too if you want to give meaningful shape to the subliminal.

Jenny Lewis and Sasha Dugdale will be in conversation with David Constantine at the McKenna Room, Christ Church, at 4pm on Saturday, March 24. Jenny will also be conducting a reading on Sunday, March 25, at Blackwell's bookshop, Broad Street, at 12.30pm.