Farnborough & District

We are a friendly and welcoming group who read and enjoy a wide range of poetry.  At each session we enjoy refreshments together and then discuss the theme.  A programme is compiled each term from members’ suggestions.  You may have a good collection of poetry books of your own but libraries, bookshops (new & second hand), and the internet are all good sources for poetry.

All are welcome, whether you are an experienced poetry reader, someone who remembers the odd line or two learnt by rote in far-off schooldays, or a newcomer.  If you have seen the film Four Weddings and a Funeral and enjoyed the lines ‘He was my north, my south, my east and west’, you have come across W H Auden.  ‘I have spread my dreams under your feet; / tread softly because you tread on my dreams’  is by W. B Yeats – a familiar reading at weddings, as is ‘How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways’ written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Sonnet 43. 

And there is so much more.  Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls owes its name to John Donne‘s poetic lines ‘Do not ask for whom the bell tolls / it tolls for thee’ and our current Poet Laureate Simon Armitage often appears on BBC Radio 4 (The Poet Laureate has gone to his Shed).  In his role as Poet Laureate, he responded to the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and then welcomed in the crowning of King Charles III.  He has published numerous collections of his poetry. 

Examples of our current and past programmes include

• Liverpool & the Mersey Sound: Poetry of the Sixties
• Spring Forward: New Growth, New Beginnings
• Poverty & Riches
• The Romantics
• The Two Elizabeths: Elizabeth Bishop & Elizabeth Jennings
• John Betjeman & Philip Larkin. 

If you would like a copy of our current programme or would like to visit us for a taster please contact the secretary as indicated above.

Remember, as John Donne wisely pointed out, ‘No man is an island’.  Come and join us for a session of poetry reading, Ancient and Modern.