Poetry Reading Group

Our poetry reading group is returning for 2025! 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!

We will be kicking off the year with three books from 2024. We’ll begin with the winner of the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize, Peter Gizzi’s stunning collection Fierce Elegy. Next, we’ll be reading Ella Frear’s long-form email to an estate agent, Goodlord. Finally, we will be reading Karen McCarthy Woolf’s self-described “deeply unreliable biography/polyvocal verse novel” about a billionaire’s doll collection, Top Doll.

Here are the dates for the upcoming reading groups:

Wednesday 12th Feb - Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi

Tuesday 11th March - Goodlord by Ella Frears

Tuesday 8th April - Top Doll by Karen McCarthy Woolf

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 Fierce Elegy...

WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2024

The powerful new collection from legendary American poet Peter Gizzi, reckoning with the transformative power of elegy through poems of lament and love

'I am awestruck, dumbfounded ... a masterwork' Ocean Vuong
'Transcendent ... He identifies the thing we're all searching for' The New Yorker

In Fierce Elegy, Peter Gizzi contends with a decade of grief, and learns to transform a broken heart into new strength. These are poems of loss; of love; of the strangeness of being a self amid the fury of the world; and of our ongoing closeness with the dead. They are soaring yet grounded, vulnerable and brave. Ears attuned, grip assured. Mind free.