Bright but Chilly March

The Poetry group met in an alternative venue this month. The Library had been taken over by numerous educational events and displays, so we move across the Junction to The Art House, and we were made very welcome and comfortable (I can recommend the coffee!)

It was a different kind of meeting because we started with a free selection of short poems which were followed by a group discussion on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. We only got through Part I 'Burial of the Dead', and that gave us a great deal to discuss. Among the short poems that preceeded this were Jenny Joseph's thought-provoking 'Dead of Night'; U.A. Fanthorpe's insightful 'Deer in Gowbarrow Park'; Thomas Hardy's charming poem 'The Weather'; Sonnet 64 from Edmund Spenser's 'Amoretti' - was he parodying convention? Spike Milligan's brilliantly daft 'Rain', and the wonderfully named Sir Aston Cokaine's 'To Plautia'. I took along Robert Herrick's surruptitiously subversive 'Cavalier' poem 'Delight in Disorder'.

Having unintentionally covered all sorts of clothing this month, next month we will probably be considering the lack of it as the topic for April is Eroticism.