Poetry Reading Group

We have three new selections for our poetry reading group! With Zain as our guide, we will be immersing ourselves in a range of exciting voices in the world of poetry. If you’re a fellow poet, a poetry fan, or just looking for your next read, please come along for a fun evening of chatting all things verse!

In July, we will be reading Diane Seuss’ latest collection, Modern Poetry. Taking an introspective lens to Romantic and Modernist verse, Seuss asks questions about the meaning of poetry and form in the world today. With her characteristic humour and self-aware tone, Seuss’ work is at once deeply insightful and entertaining.

Here are the dates for the upcoming reading groups:

Tuesday 6th May - Crush by Richard Siken

Tuesday 24th June - Stags Leap by Sharon Olds

Wednesday 16th July - Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss

There’s no need to prepare but if you feel like it, please feel free to mention a poem, line or stanza you particularly liked (or disliked!) from the collection over the course of the evening.

About Modern Poetry:

Diane Seuss’s signature voice – audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude – has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach.

Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft – ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda – and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover and interlocutor.

In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time’s deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean? ‘It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem,’ Seuss writes. ‘You can’t hide / from what you made / inside what you made.’ What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.

‘Alongside Terrance Hayes, Diane Seuss has a strong case to be considered as the most influential American poet of the last 10 years. A former social worker, over six collections she has become renowned for her fearless excavation of her life in her work…. With her formidable voice, Seuss is one of the most important poets writing now.’ — Rishi Dastidar, Telegraph