A slightly thinner crowd than usual, more due to illness than to any disinterest in the poetry of Byron and Shelley.
We were grateful to Ann Barlow for her summary of both poets’ lives and work, then the reading began. More than one person read excerpts from Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ and we paid tribute to Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ and ‘Ode To A Skylark.’ In all, eleven of Shelley’s poems were read and thirteen of Byron’s. It was good to be reacquainted with these two poets and to hear their stories.
This was the first occasion we had been together since the Christmas break and it seemed like a long time. The first twenty minutes was taken up with a talk by Jean Ellis about her novel ‘Goodbye Burma’
Goodbye Burma author Jean Ellis
This has created a lot of interest in the group and we wanted to hear more, especially about how the book came to be written. It turned out that this has been a project with Jean for many years with new information coming through all the time as she pieced the story together from contemporary accounts and family diaries . Her book has been vastly enjoyed by members and well received in the wider world. She now has several speaking engagements on the strength of it.
As usual, at the beginning of term, the topic was ‘Open Choice’ . There were poems by John Clare, C.M. Hopkins, Thaomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, Matthew Sweeney, Srarh Corbett, Deborah Ingram, Joan Weston, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harry Graham, Gillian Clarke, John keats, Elizabeth Jennings (3 poems) Ogden Nash, Vernon Waring, Sasha Dugdale, Kei Miller, Chritopher Houghton, Ruth Smith, John Betjeman, Stuart Henson, Hilaire Belloc, Chris Hardy, W. H. Auden, Andre Maginou, Katherine Daskiewicz and A.E. Housman – quite a banquet in fact
Shortlands Poetry Circle 