Unspoken Words - death, grief and loss in poetry

Unspoken Words
Tue 24 February 2026,
7-9.30pm
The Central Bar, Gateshead
Tickets: £5

Part of Gateshead Festival of Compassion https://www.compassionategateshead.org/festival 

Join us for an evening of spoken word on a theme seldom heard - death, grief and loss.

Celebrating the power of words to comfort, connect and commemorate. Poetry about death and loss is also love poetry. Words can inspire us, sustain us and help us to process our feelings.

Join Newcastle performance poet and playwright, Richard Boggie and feature performance poets - Nik Cairns, Rowan McCabe and a third featured performer to be announced. 

Richard Boggie
Richard Boggie is a playwright, performance poet, disability activist and access consultant based in Newcastle upon Tyne.
His work is often playful and comedic, but tackles important equality and social justice issues, using his lived experience of sight loss and disability to create insightful and challenging work.

Nik Cairns
Nik is a charity worker, writer, and poet from the North East, creating pieces that focus on grief and love - which in many ways are the same thing. He started writing poetry at the age of 4 and hasn’t grown out of it yet. You can both hear and read more of his work on Instagram, Spotify and all streaming platforms under @nik_poetry.

Rowan McCabe
Rowan McCabe is a poet and a professional waffler from Newcastle upon Tyne. He has written for Channel 4, BBC Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’, and his work has been featured in the Guardian and on BBC Breakfast. He has toured across the UK and has appeared at Glastonbury Festival and the Royal Albert Hall. His first full-length book, The Door-to-Door Poet, was published by Eye Books in September 2025.
“Invaluable”- the Guardian
“Highly talented with verse” – Broadway Baby “
Absolutely riveting” – Attila the Stockbroker

Tahmina Ali
Tahmina Ali is a Newcastle-based spoken word poet and storyteller whose work dwells in the spaces between loss and becoming. Her poetry explores grief, identity, racism, motherhood and memory— how language can carry what is too heavy, too complex, or too painful to say outright.
Drawing from lived experience, including the loss of her sister, the inheritance of cultural trauma, and the disorienting, grounding love of motherhood, Tahmina’s work moves through themes of unravelling and return, losing herself and finding new shapes of self again. She is the founder of Freespill, co-editor of Thresholds; poems by South Asian women in the North East and a two-time ABC Arts & Culture Award winner, known for emotionally honest performances that invite audiences to sit with discomfort, tenderness and truth.


Got a favourite poem that has sustained you through a period of grieving, or caring for a dying loved one?
Why not share it in our open mic session?
Open Mic sign-up wil be on the night.