READING POEMS BY PUBLISHED POETS AND TALKING ABOUT THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT HOPE IS AND CAN BE

For George Herbert, hope is an anchor and for Emily Dickinson a thing with feathers. But the painter G F Watts had other ideas: he pictured it (above) as a she, blind or at least blindfolded, sitting in apparent comfort on top of the world and trying to hear what music the single surviving string of her broken lyre could play to her and anyone listening. The enigma is telling.

Some of the poets featured in our session 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, 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.

These sessions are always focussed 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.