Don’t measure your life out in teaspoons this spring, instead get involved with a great new poetry project from local poetry pioneer and friend of Bath Royal Sue Boyle.

TS ELIOT’S The Waste Land is one of the most baffling and beguiling English language poems of the twentieth century. Readers are often haunted by its lines but confused by its apparently random structure and defeated in their search for ‘meaning’ in the whole.  For some people, the notorious notes make more problems than they solve. 

During the lockdowns of 2021, twenty four experienced West Country writers met fortnightly on zoom to try to map The Waste Land maze. Many of them created new pieces in response to the workshop sessions and these have now been forged into a full length collaborative multimedia piece.  The Waste Land Revisited will be performed in Bath in June to celebrate the publication centenary of Eliot’s early masterpiece. 

The Waste Land is not a polite piece of poetry. Rape, adultery, abortion, infanticide, poisoning, casual sex, suicide and murder lie just beneath the polished surface of its lines.’ Bath Poet and poetry events organiser Sue Boyle will be sharing the evolution of this unusual performance piece , supported by singers Peter Reason and Miranda Pender who will premier a Waste Land inspired song with the least likely subject that any of us could have imagined or devised as suitable entertainment for the Elwin Room. Sue will also be asking whether Eliot’s poem would have seemed much less problematical if he had retained his original ideas for its title and epigraph and declined to provide his publisher with those pesky Notes.