POETRY lovers are in for a treat this February, as writer, teacher, lecturer, translator and broadcaster, Graham Fawcett, hosts an evening dedicated to world poet Thomas Hardy at The Bush Hotel in Farnham.

Thomas Hardy became a poet because of Queen Victoria. Born in 1840, three years after her accession, Hardy the great Victorian novelist hit on a drastic way of dealing with the tsunami of Victorian moral and critical outrage, which greeted both Tess and Jude The Obscure - he turned his back on fiction and his already prolific life of 14 novels and three books of short stories, and dramatically re-invented himself at the age of 55 as the poet he had really always been since writing, in his 20s, many poems he had never published.

The death of his first wife Emma in 1912 led directly to the best poetry Hardy ever wrote.

By the time of his death in 1928, Hardy had some 10 collections and nearly a thousand poems to his name, some of them acknowledged now as among the finest in the English language.

From the momentous scena of the aged bird in The Darkling Thrush whose song at dusk Hardy imagined heralding the new century against all the odds, through love poems, like Beeny Cliff and Thoughts of Phena, in which he is crafting dynamic cameos of women in the west country from Dorset to Cornwall, to the robustly virtuoso pacing in his parable -like re-staging of the encounter of the Titanic and the iceberg, in The Convergence of the Twain.

Hardy the poet was a prominent technician of every aspect of poetic music from the placing of a syllable to the architecture of a stanza.

And all of it will be there for the enjoying for £15, in Hardy night at the Bush Hotel in Farnham on Monday, February 13, at 7pm. For full booking details see www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/events.htm.

Alternatively send cash or a cheque made payable to Graham Fawcett, to Elizabeth Cooney, 5 Adams Park Road, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 9QG. Any unsold tickets will be available at the door on the night.