Poetry Club: Sarah Howe

Poetry Club welcomes the acclaimed Hong Kong-born British poet Sarah Howe to The Coronet Theatre for a remarkable evening of poetry. Howe will be reading from her extraordinary new collection Foretokens (Chatto & Windus).

Unearthed from a clear-out, a picture calendar becomes the starting point for Foretokens, a landmark new collection that returns to the riddle of belonging explored in Howe’s award-winning debut, Loop of Jade. At its heart lies her mother’s clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman with her own hidden motives. Moving across continents, languages and generations, the poems form a personal Babel of voices and identities, where objects of witness recur – fragile porcelains, old postcards, family artefacts – and poems act as ‘foretokens’: omens that gesture towards both historical reckoning and future possibility.

At once intellectually agile and emotionally devastating, Foretokens has been hailed as a monumental work of survival and creation, turning over what is left behind as it strikes out towards astonishing new vistas.