Esiri’s happy band proves poetry is alive and kicking

A Poem for Every Night of the Year

The former actor Allie Esiri is on a mission to bring poetry into the digital age with iF, her app for “children of all ages”. It features performances by actors such as Helena Bonham Carter and Bill Nighy, and allows people to record their own readings to share on social media. But she hasn’t deserted poetry’s traditional homelands: the book and live readings.

On Friday, to mark her new anthology, A Poem for Every Night of the Year, she hosted a series of readings at the National Theatre. Performing were actors Samuel West, Hattie Morahan (The Golden Compass), Kate Duchêne (The Worst Witch) and Giles

Terera (Horrible Histories); in the audience, having been mobbed by young female fans wanting selfies, was Bonham Carter.

Esiri spoke of the importance of reading verse aloud, citing TS Eliot’s seminal line on poetry’s ability to “communicate before it is understood”.

The poems she chose – from Tennyson (“The Charge of the Light Brigade”) to Michael Rosen’s “The Car Trip” (“Mum says:/ ‘Right you two,/this is a very long car journey./I want you two to be good…’”) all lent themselves admirably to performance on stage.

Duchêne brought the house down with her reading of the Rosen, while Morahan performed Ken Nesbitt’s “X-Box, X-Box – A Love Poem” with a knowing sexy breathiness. Terera read a pitch-perfect “Talking Turkeys” by Benjamin Zephaniah (“Be nice to yu turkeys dis Christmas”) and West delivered emotional punch with Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”.

Auden once wrote, “poetry makes nothing happen”. Esiri seems determined to prove this wrong.