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 week, we’re taking a look at Rachel Mann’s Eleanor Among the Saints, nominated for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Award. Like all great art, this collection asks more questions than it answers in its exploration of trans-identity, faith, myth, and language — all through the prism of the disputed story of Eleanor Rykener, a medieval trans woman, seamstress and sex worker.

Commended for A Poetry Book Society

Recommendation 2024. Short-listed for The T.S. Eliot Prize 2024

'All poetry has something to do with bodies being transformed - whether in violence and grief, or in hope, in embrace, in miracle. Rachel Mann's brilliant collection is about these transformations, realised for us here with exhilarating verbal energy and emotional subtlety, a poetry that is solid and fluid at the same time, as bodies are.' - Rowan Williams

'Rachel Mann weaves an intricate web of language to examine the intimate relationship between the transforming, transformative body, between sexuality and spirituality, between religious ecstasy, fear and love.' - Kim Moore

'Nobody else could have written this: poems formed in the space where divinity, the body, trans identity and history fold together. A singular, sensational collection.' - Andrew McMillan