Welcome to the Close
Starting out life as an open mic night in the cosy upstairs room at Sonder Coffee, Close Poetry has grown into a community of poets and poetry lovers who meet to enjoy live performances, drinks, and creative conversation!
If you're curious about attending one of our next events, you're a venue looking to host a poetry event, or you're a poet looking to perform a headline slot, get in touch at the bottom of the page!
Millie Woodrow
Get in touch
Hi, I'm Millie and I run Close Poetry!
After finishing my MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, I wanted to find a writerly community in my home town that would nourish my work the same way my university course mates had done. Working in Sonder Coffee, everyday I would chat to writers and poets who came to the shop. Speaking with them always reignited a creative flame in me, it made me excited to get home and back to my desk — I wanted to find a way to bring these people together, to create a network of writers who could inspire each other to keep creating and sharing work. Enter Close Poetry!
To tell you a little bit about me - I write on themes of grief and emotion, memory and history, archaeology, nature and landscape. I'm a fanatical reader of Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Edna O' Brien, and Sara Baume to name just a few.
When I'm not making coffee or organising events, I review poetry for Anteroom Magazine. I love work that centres around emotion and memory, that presses at the outer limits of our human experience. I'm also interested in work that plays with the historical, the ecological, and their intersection in landscape. If you'd like to send me a copy of your book to review, send me an email.
My debut pamphlet Venus in the Forest was published in July 2026 by Seedlings Press. You can buy a copy here.
Animated by the sharp realities of sorrow and loss, Woodrow has created a series of subtle, transformative pathways through the fantastical landscapes of grief, their living world of trees and water, stones and plants and wildlife. These are poems of songlike composition and fine, dramatic imagining - hard to believe this is a debut, so poised and charged is its achievement. — Jane Draycott
This is wild, romantic memory work — Barney Norris
Woodrow is a poet with as much dirt under her nails as ink. She buries, exhumes, plants, germinates with the wild restlessness of both young girls and ancient gods. In the lush thicket of these pages, inflected with folk horror and archaeology, the air tastes of wet earth; quenching, satisfying, dark. — Ellora Sutton