Special Topic for October was Gold.

Sandy reports: We had another great mix of poems at the last poetry meeting. My favourite was 'Gold' by Donald Hall which had so much under the surface. Nobody felt able to criticise it because of the circumstances under which it was written (his wife dying of cancer)- it is just so poignant. 'Churning Day' by Heaney is beautiful and brought up the old poetry vs. prose debate and Mark managed to stun us all again with 'Byzantium' by Yeats. Freda read 'Soybeans' which also sparked a lot of discussion. Lolly came along and brought a Carol Ann Duffy poem, 'Education for Leisure', which had recently been controversially banned from the school syllabus for potentially inciting and glorifying knife crime. As you can imagine this also raised some interesting discussion.