Dear Poetry Friends
Here is new booking information about the 5-8 Feb coastal poetry retreat in Dorset.
The date for Poetry and Hope online has been changed to 18 Feb.
Booking is also now open for Poetry and Silence live in London on 24 Feb, See below.
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THREE EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY MONTH EVENTS
POETRY AND . . .
LIVE ON THE DORSET COAST
Thursday 5th to Sunday 8th February 2026
from 4pm on Thursday 5th to after lunch on Sunday 8th
Othona Community, Coast Road, Burton Bradstock, Bridport, Dorset
8 places already taken, 6 left.
We are living in unusual times. Never has a small community like Othona seemed more able to fill the gap in our lives and massage what we have.
The four themes of this weekend belong together like a quartet of instruments: hope against the odds, strength to manage our lives and ourselves, discovery of new ways and possibilities, and silence as a place of renewal and energy.
For full details and how to book, go to
https://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/event/poetryandretreat-2-2/
NEW LINK
For more about Othona, the sea and the countryside, go to
https://www.othona.org/civicrm/event/info/?reset=1&id=2324®ion=dorset
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POETRY AND HOPE ONLINE
George Fredrick Watts and assistants, Hope (1886), Tate Britain, London
NEW DATE
Wednesday 18 February 2026, 1530 to 1700 online
For George Herbert, hope is an anchor and for Emily Dickinson a thing with feathers. But the painter G F Watts had other ideas.
Some of the poets featured leave us in no doubt as to how they see hope. Others share Watts’s sense of it as a mystery. Quite which is which we will discover in poems by America’s Dickinson and Emerson; Nobel Laureates Heaney and Szymborska; Wales’s former National Poet Gillian Clarke; Hardy, Herbert, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Patrick Creagh, and a single verse from Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
These sessions are always focused and informal. Everyone can feel free to express their thoughts and feelings about the poems as they want to. A lot of ground gets covered, poems and readers come alive, and friends are quickly made of the poets and each other.
More details and to book, click https://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/event/poetryandhopeonline2026-2-2-2-2
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POETRY AND SILENCE AT THE LAMB
Tuesday 24 February 2026, 7-915pm good supper menu available
Empire Bar, The Lamb, 94 Lamb’s Conduit St, London WC1N 3LZ
Poems from Akhmatova, Basho, Dickinson, Frost, J Graham, Heaney, Herbert, J Hirshfield, Keats, Qiu Wei, Rimbaud, Saba, W Stevens, Edward Thomas, Wordsworth, Yeats
Edward Thomas is gifted an owl’s cry in the night, Arthur Rimbaud holds his breath at dawn, Jorie Graham reflects on silence in the poem, Qiu Wei is walking in the hills, Wallace Stevens whispering about Winter.
For more, click on https://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/event/poetryandsilenceeveningatthelamb-2-2-2
All best wishes
Graham