The Way We Live

The Poetry Trio

The winners of the 2007 Buxton Fringe Festival Spoken Word award perform a 55-minute recital of poetry by various authors on the subject of everyday living today. The programme is made up entirely of poems that the audience can take in at a single hearing, with the help of short linking introductions.

Featured poems include W.H. Davies' Leisure, W.H. Auden's The Unknown Citizen, Philip Larkin's Afternoons, Pam Ayres' Sling Another Chair-leg on the Fire, Mother, and Elizabeth Jennings' Warning to Parents, and other featured poets include Wendy Cope, U.A. Fanthorpe, Fleur Adcock, Sheenagh Pugh, Carole Satyamurti, Fred Voss, Tony Curtis and Christine Evans. 

The recital begins with several well-known poetic critiques of modern urban living, including the comically satirical On a Tired Housewife — but also delves a little beneath the popular clichés on the subject, and questions aspects of the rural alternative too. Favourite rituals of Christmas and holidays are examined, some sharply, some humorously, and a couple of poems look at popular entertainment from soap operas to disaster movies. 

The subject of the working lives of a diversity of people surfaces at intervals during the recital, ranging from factory machinists to company executives and from management consultants to hair stylists. Another sequence of poems reflects on common everyday fears, but Sheenagh Pugh’s 147 finds emblems of hope and resilience in the climax of a snooker-match. A series of poems then examines the strength people derive from relationships that outwardly may seem merely humdrum, and the recital ends with a reminder that modern living does contain features to be glad of. 

The members of The Poetry Trio met at a regional heat of the National Speak-a-Poem Competition in 1988, and have performed recitals of classic and modern verse together at arts festivals and other venues since 1991. The group generally create a new programme each year, and in 1998 they recorded “Love and Journeys”, an audiocassette of extracts from two of their recitals.