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.

October sees us diving into Stephen Sexton’s second collection, Cheryl’s Destinies. Anyone familiar with Sexton’s Forward Prize winning debut, If All The World and Love Were Young, will be aware of his mind-boggling ability to make you sit up and say ‘wait, what?’.

A thrillingly strange exploration of the comfort of the fantastical when the real is hard to bear, Cheryl's Destinies is a reckoning with both public and private tragedies, divided into three parts. Ranging from Old Europe, to a trans-Atlantic cross-century symposium, to the permanent anniversary of something terrible, there's always Cheryl in the moonlight and her deck of tarot cards.

'A witty, compassionate act of time travel' - Financial Times Books of the Year

'Fleet-footed and irrepressibly charming' - The Telegraph Books of the Year

‘Stephen Sexton makes anything seem possible: the simplest things and the most mysterious - which, of course, are one and the same.’ - Geoff Dyer

‘In Cheryl's Destinies, Stephen Sexton throws time into a dance with itself. Surreal and prismatic, weird and shape-shifting, these poems are missives from a rare and rapturous imagination.’ - Sean Hewitt

'Stephen Sexton is a fabulous poet: gifted with a delicate ear, a humane and generous sensibility, and attentive to both the absurdities and the wonders of modern life. It's a joy to read these unexpected and thrilling poems.' - Nick Laird