The Tuesday Poets are a group of ten poets from Sheffield who not only each enjoy individual success, but also meet each month, sometimes on a Tuesday. However, Friday 30th October saw their first public reading as a group, opening with the hint that ‘if it works, perhaps we’ll do it again.’ Having attended the event, and found it any enjoyable source of food for both body and mind, I sincerely believe that it’d be a great shame of they didn’t.
The evening took lace at the ‘Fusion Organic Café’ on Arundel Street, which was recently named the ‘best café in Sheffield’. It also proved apt that the venue was named ‘Fusion’, as the bringing together of diversity was to become a recurring theme of the night.
The readings began with veteran poet Jenny Hockey, who quickly establishing the dimension added to poetry when it is read aloud by its author. The performance itself became a poetic device. Having instantly been seduced by Jenny’s smooth, calm and ultimately reassuring delivery it came as an even more poignant shock when it became clear that her second poem, The Fruit that you Eat, was potentially about suicide, whilst Empty Chairs Fading presented a meditation on the loss inherent in a linear existence. This intentional chasm between performance and content characterised a key duality of the evening: the elegant juxtaposition between happiness and inevitable sadness.
As the night drew to a close, Noel Williams presented a series of poems that brought together many of the disparate elements of the prior evening. With a seemingly self-concious consideration of diversity, Noel presented Measures: a perfectly balanced exercise in juxtaposition, whilst his other contributions demonstrated a penchant for double and merged meanings and the collision of classic and contemporary modes creating a sense of utter fusion.
Seni Seneviratne gave the final collection, bringing the themes of the evening firmly unto the realms of human experience, presenting poetry of testimony and witness. In her final poem, Dandelion Clocks, Seni emphasises how precious children are and how they provide an escape from the inevitable cycle of life, love and loss. In observing her granddaughter playing, the poet glimpses a way of ‘replanting [herself] in the earth of [her] own beginning’.
By offering diversity, the whole evening allowed for a unique insight into human experience, becoming more than an evening of poetry readings but in many ways a fully formed living anthology.