| Group | Poetry Appreciation Group |
| When | Once a month; days may vary. |
| Where | The August meeting will be held in a member's house |
| Contact | Email Poetry Group coordinator |
| Next meeting | Thursday, 29 October 2026 at 2.00 p.m. Please choose a poem relating to Animals. We are meeting at Islebrough. |
| Accessibility | Plenty of parking, |
| Refreshments | Refreshments provided |
We each choose a poem to read and comment on and then we discuss it in the group. Sometimes we have themes for the meetings, and at other meetings we just choose a favourite poem. You can choose old favourites, newly discovered or even your own poems.
If you would like to come, please email the organiser for details. There is a limit on numbers.
We take it in turns to provide biscuits.
For our July meeting we took the theme of summer. The poems chosen spanned five centuries and either mentioned summer or hinted at it. We had The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W.B. Yeats, followed by the Shakespearean sonnet which begins Shall I compare thee to a summer's day. The poems Peat Cutting by George Mackay Brown and The Brook by Edward Thomas, (author of Adelstrop), captured the sense of summer. Robert Louis Stevenson's Bed in Summer and Philip Larkin's The School in August showed activities not normally associated with the season. Roger McGough's Summer with Monica was a glorious romp and there was a dash of humour with James Kirkup's To an Old Lady Asleep at a Poetry Reading. Rosalind
24 September - The theme of this month's meeting of the poetry group was peace in its various aspects. It could be the peace of moonlight, as expressed in the 1896 poem The White Peace by William Sharp (writing as Fiona Macleod): "sometimes...The moonlight of a perfect peace / Floods heart and brain." Or it could be in sleep - the 16th century poet John Fletcher wrote in his poem Sleep: "Come sleep, and with they sweet deceiving / Lock me in delight awhile", or in escapism - W.B. Yeats thought he would find peace away from the world in The Lake Isle of Innisfree, where he would live alone in the "bee loud glade". Peace could be found in love, as in Shetland poet Christian Tait's poem Today, describing lying in bed with her fingers entwined with those of her husband. However, peace is not always perfect bliss. It could be "piecemeal",or a "poor peace", according to Gerard Manley Hopkins, or a more bitter peace, hard won after war, as in the poems After the Battle by A.P. Herbert. Also about war, Serenity by J.W. Street captures a rare moment of peace. Ultimately, peace could be found in nothingness or the absence of a tyrant. Ozymandias has fallen and beside his ruined statue: "the lone and level sands stretch far away."