Poetry Club: Sarah Howe, Michael Symmons Roberts & Suzannah V. Evans

Poetry Club welcomes Sarah Howe, Michael Symmons Roberts and Suzannah V. Evans to The Coronet Theatre for an evening of powerful new poetry. Across intimate family histories, acts of care and encounters with the natural world, their work explores belonging, memory and our fragile connections to one another and the living world. Each poet reads from a major recent collection: Howe from Foretokens, Symmons Roberts from Dog Star, and Evans from Under the Blue.

Unearthed objects, inherited stories and shifting geographies shape Sarah Howe’s Foretokens, a luminous and searching meditation on migration and belonging. Moving across continents, languages and generations, Howe gathers family traces into poems that act as omens, “foretokens”, of both historical reckoning and future possibility.

“Thoughtful, agile, erudite. . . observations that make the everyday seem magic” – Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph

Rooted in encounters with birds, trees, fish and other living forms, Michael Symmons Roberts’ Dog Star unfolds as a poignant, linked sequence attentive to moments of grace. The poems explore our increasingly turbulent relationship with nature and ask what it means to remain spiritually and physically connected to the more-than-human world.

“An outstanding writer” – Sunday Times

In Under the Blue, Suzannah V. Evans offers a glittering, fragmentary sequence of prose poems and lyrical meditations on intimacy, illness and the work of care. Moving between beauty and pain with striking clarity, the collection maps the rituals of tenderness and the fragile language of love, creating a deeply humane portrait of what it means to look after one another.

“A marvellous, wrenching collection. Evans hears the world around her like no one else; she paces from beauty to agony and back without missing a step” – Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place

Sarah Howe

Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother. Her debut collection Loop of Jade won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. She co-founded the online journal Prac Crit and is Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool.

Michael Symmons Roberts

Michael Symmons Roberts has published eight poetry collections and is the winner of the Forward Prize, Costa Poetry Award and Whitbread Poetry Prize. A celebrated librettist and broadcaster, he is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Suzannah V. Evans

Suzannah V. Evans is a poet, researcher and educator. Her debut collection Under the Blue is longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and her work has received the Ivan Juritz Prize and a Northern Writers’ Award. She teaches poetry in adult education and works with Poetry By Heart.