Women poets course at Sarum College

With Nicola Slee

There is a long and venerable tradition of women’s religious poetry, although it is much less well known than the comparable male canon. Beyond the explicitly religious, many female poets engage with broad spiritual themes of truth, meaning, longing, healing and redemption. In this short course, we will draw on some of this neglected tradition, mostly from the contemporary era and in English to illuminate our own quest for God and the place poetry can play in our spiritual lives.

Poets chosen may include: Gillian Allnutt, Maya Angelou, Liz Berry, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Lucille Clifton, U A Fanthorpe, Jane Hirshfield, Elizabeth Jennings, Jane Kenyon, Denise Levertov, Rachel Mann, Marge Piercy, Sylvia Plath, Kathleen Raine, Stevie Smith and Alice Walker.

In combining close readings of poems with a consideration of the contexts of the poet’s lives, we will seek to unearth the conditions that provoked their writing and consider how their poetry may inform our own writing, as well as our lives. There will be opportunity for creative writing, using prompts from the poems studied, as well as plenty of time to talk around the poems and the issues they give rise to.