Simon McBurney, Tishani Doshi and More Will Bring Poetry to The Coronet Theatre

The Coronet Theatre has built a reputation for presenting outstanding poetry events in its two Poetry strands: Poetry Club brings together some of the most significant UK and international poets for intimate readings, and Dead Poets Live, which has established a cult following for dramatised readings of classic poetry, attracting some of Britain’s finest actors.

This June The Coronet will present two special poetry events. Poetry Club will present readings from three award winning contemporary poets. Tishani Doshi will read from her own collection Egrets, While War and will also translate unpublished poems by Palestinian poet Asmaa Azaizeh. They are joined by Isabelle Baafi, who will read from her debut collection Chaotic Good. 

For Dead Poets Live, actor and theatre-maker Simon McBurney will explore the fascinating life of British poet, Basil Bunting, and perform,  sixty years after its first publication, his long poem Briggflatts, one of the greatest – and most unjustly neglected – poetic accomplishments in English. 

Poetry Club: Tishani Doshi, Asmaa Azaizeh & Isabelle Baafi

Thursday 4 June at 7.30pm

June’s edition of Poetry Club is an evening of readings from three compelling voices in contemporary poetry: Tishani Doshi, Asmaa Azaizeh and Isabelle Baafi. Moving between questions of conflict, identity and belonging, intimate histories and acts of personal transformation, their work explores how language bears witness to the pressures of our time. Doshi will read from her new collection Egrets, While War, Azaizeh will present recent unpublished poems in Arabic with English translations read by Doshi, and Baafi will read from her award-winning debut collection Chaotic Good.

In Tishani Doshi‘s Egrets, While War, birds become messengers and witnesses, from mythic creatures of ancient epics to the everyday city pigeon, navigating environmental loss, ancestral memory, ageing, and the devastations of war. With lyric precision and emotional breadth, Doshi’s poems turn intimacy into a form of radical presence, offering a meditation on survival, of species, history, and the heart.

Palestinian poet Asmaa Azaizeh will read a selection of recent, unpublished poems exploring genocide and witnessed war, as well as the quieter, often overlooked struggles over identity, history and language. Written from her perspective as a Palestinian born in the 1948 territories, the poems also reflect on recent migration and the experience of motherhood. Azaizeh will read in Arabic, with English translations read by Tishani Doshi.

Winner of the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, Isabelle Baafi’s Chaotic Good is a piercing debut about how we are made, how

we get lost and how we find new selves. Framed by the story of escape from a toxic marriage, the collection traces the shifting dynamics of power within both home and community. Incisive, formally inventive and deeply humane, Baafi’s poems explore self- determination and the search for renewal in the aftermath of rupture.

Tishani Doshi is a poet, essayist and fiction writer. Her most recent books are Girls are Coming Out of the Woods, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for poetry, and a novel, Small Days and Nights, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. For fifteen years she worked as a dancer with the Chandralekha Group in Chennai. Her fourth full-length collection of poetry, A

God at the Door, has just been published by Bloodaxe Books. She is a visiting associate professor at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and otherwise lives in Tamil Nadu, India. Doshi was part of Coronet Inside Out in 2021.

Asmaa Azaizeh is a Palestinian poet, writer, performer and editor based in London. She is the author of four poetry collections and a memoir, A Year of Small Museums (2024).

Her 2018 collection Don’t Believe Me If I Talk of War has been translated into several languages and formed the basis of an audio-visual performance that premiered at the Avignon

Theatre Festival in 2022. She previously served as the first Director of the Mahmoud Darwish Museum in Ramallah and has worked as a journalist, broadcaster and cultural organiser.

Isabelle Baafi is a poet, editor and critic. Her pamphlet Ripe won the Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her debut collection Chaotic

Good (Faber, 2025) won the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, The London Magazine and Oxford Poetry.

Dead Poets Live: Briggflatts - An Autobiography by Basil Bunting

Starring Simon McBurney

19 – 21 June at 7.30pm

In 1964, Basil Bunting, as old as the century, was living near Newcastle in grinding poverty and obscurity, an extinguished star of the Modernist era who’d barely written a poem in 30 years, now working as a sub-editor on a local paper. What happened next is one of the great stories, and achievements, of English literature: the poem that Bunting set himself to make, Briggflatts, has been compared favourably to Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos by the poet Thom Gunn, among others. It may be the richest, most musical, most wide-ranging and most moving long poem in English of the twentieth century: an unforgiving self-reckoning by a poet in old age, a history of human violence and folly across the centuries, a journey through Northumbria, Italy, the Arctic Ocean, Bloomsburyite London and Iran, a love story spanning fifty years, and the autobiography of a man whose life almost defies belief. It’s wise, lyrical, regretful, learnèd, tough, funny, heartbreaking and one of the few truly indispensable poems of our language. Dead Poets Live’s new show weaves together the story of Bunting’s astonishing life and the poem he wrote in response to it, presenting the work in full. Above all, Briggflatts is a poem whose author intended it to be experienced in performance; to be heard by a live audience. Simon McBurney, one of Britain’s most respected actors and theatre- makers, will explore Bunting’s life and perform, sixty years after its first publication, one of the greatest – and most unjustly neglected – poetic accomplishments in English.

Dead Poets Live have established a cult following at The Coronet Theatre for their dramatised readings of classic poetry, attracting some of Britain’s finest actors including Rory Kinnear, Patsy Ferran, Lindsay Duncan, Denise Gough, Toby Jones, Eanna Hardwicke and Tom Hiddleston. All proceeds from their evenings go to the charity Safe Passage. 

Dead Poets Live is devised and supported by The T.S. Eliot Foundation.

Actor, writer and director Simon McBurney is one of the most innovative, mercurial and influential theatre-makers working today. In 1983, he co-founded the company Complicité and since then all his work has been made through a deeply researched and highly collaborative process which fuses a profound belief that all aspects of the theatre should challenge the limits of theatrical form.

His recent work includes: Figures in Extinction, a four-year, cross-continental collaboration with choreographer Crystal Pite for Nederlands Dans Theater, the return of Mnemonic at The National Theatre, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Can I Live? and The Encounter.

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