Cluster Fig began during the slow days of the pandemic lockdown as an intimate monthly gathering of friends reading English poetry that had moved, unsettled or delighted us through the month. Named after a poem by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, whose work many of us cherish, the series has always been an open, unthemed space for attentive listening and inspired reading.

The community is thrilled to have been bringing Cluster Fig into a physical setting at the BLR Design Centre for the past few months. This September in-person edition is dedicated to the extraordinary poetry of Louise Glück, whose poems look unflinchingly at love, loss, solitude, grief, family, desire, death and the strange business of being alive. Glück’s language can feel impossibly austere most times, until suddenly, a single line churns something inside you that can lead to an oceanic thrill or a chilling silence, both of which, we hope, will wake you to a new sense of looking, feeling, being.

We’ll read Glück’s poems aloud, sit with their silences as if it were an act similar to prayer, and discover (or rediscover, if you’re already a fan) together why her work is startlingly familiar and intimate as well as effortlessly universal, while also discovering its sharpness. You don’t need to know Glück, or even consider yourself a “poetry person”. Come and join us. Poetry will do the rest. Something akin to magic.