Dear Poetry Friends
FEBRUARY TO APRIL 2026 NEWSLETTER
February 5-8
LAST-MINUTE PLACES AVAILABLE
Poetry and Hope, Strength, Discovery and Silence is a full-board poetry retreat in a homely house, Othona West Dorset, overlooking the Jurassic Coast near Burton Bradstock. There will be three days of opportunities to read and talk together about poems by a wide range of poets and also free time to read, walk, and write.
More at https://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/event/poetryandretreat-2-2/
Or phone Othona on 01308 897130
Or go straight to the Othona website at https://www.othona.org/civicrm/event/info/?reset=1&id=2324®ion=dorset
February 18
Poetry and Hope online
The second in this online series. Reading and discussion of poems by America’s Dickinson, Emerson and Wylie; 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.
More at:
https://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/event/poetryandhopeonline2026-2-2-2-2/
Poetry and Silence live at The Lamb in Bloomsbury – Feb 24
The third in this live series in the upstairs bar at the Lamb. Poems to be read and talked about by Akhmatova, Basho, Dickinson, Frost, J Graham, Heaney, Herbert, Keats, Qiu Wei, Rimbaud, Saba, Sappho, W Stevens, Edward Thomas, Wordsworth, Yeats. Supper menu available.
More at https://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/event/poetryandsilenceeveningatthelamb-2-2-2/
Poetry and Discovery online – March 25
The third in this online series. Reading and discussion of poems by Fleur Adcock, Elizabeth Bishop, W Carlos Williams, F Horowitz, Galway Kinnell, Ivan Lalíc, Philip Larkin, John Ormond, William Stafford and Tomas Transtromer.
More at:
https://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/event/poetrydiscoveryonline-2-2-2-2/
Emily Dickinson in Taunton – April 22
As a teenage child-man in the 1960s, new to what women might want, I saw in Emily Dickinson a phenomenon no-one had introduced me to: a young woman who wanted a nest in which to create, not procreate. I worried about what she was depriving herself of by not going out. She, meanwhile, was clear: the nest she needed was the one she was already in. Her impulse to put herself away may have been sharpened by losses in love, but she turned her face from the world not in order to weaponize despair, but as a valorous means to a single-minded end. Her asylum default had become solitude of a high order. This is how high:
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself—
Finite infinity.
More at: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/brendonbooks/graham-fawcett-emily-dickinson/e-dlxkym
I hope to see you !
Graham