Poetry Reading Group

Our poetry reading group is back for a new season, featuring contemporary classics! We’ve a wide range of poetry to jump into; from the political, to heartache and loneliness, the poets I’ve chosen get to the nub of what it means to be human, in all its painful glory.

This first week we’ll be reading Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. I probably say this too much for too many people, but dear Terry really is in GOAT contention. To describe these poems as political is to do them a deep disservice.

These sonnets cover everything from the legacy of Emmett Till to Trump’s America, from the impact of Black artists on America’s culture to what it means to be a man. The poems in this collection are deceptively contained, lyrically deep, and signed off by Hayes’ signature wit, all guaranteed to remind you why you love poetry.

THE SUNDAY TIMES POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE

The black poet would love to say his century began
With Hughes or God forbid, Wheatley, but actually
It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors,
Poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset
Bridges & windows. In a second I'll tell you how little
Writing rescues.

So begins this astonishing, muscular sequence by one of America's best-selling and most acclaimed poets. Over 70 poems, each titled 'American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin' and shot through with the vernacular energy of popular culture, Terrance Hayes maneuvers his way between touching domestic visions, stories of love, loss and creation, tributes to the fallen and blistering denunciations of the enemies of the good.

American Sonnets builds a living picture of the whole self, and the whole human, even as it opens to the view the dividing lines of race, gender and political oppression which define the early 21st Century. It is compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, bewildered - and unstoppably, rhythmically compelling, as few books can hope to be.