Abse makes the heart grow fonder

Dannie Abse and Louis Zukovsky are the book-ends of English poetry: its two alphabetical extremities. For that reason alone, I've been aware of Dannie Abse for a long time. Nonetheless, it was only hearing him on the Oxfam CD Life Lines 2 recently which gave me a particular spur to read his work. It was another Oxfam store which duly obliged, with a selection of his poems from 1963 (I'm aware he's had time to move on since, having published his latest collection, Running Late, in 2006).

The poem which stood out to me was one which provided an amusing commentary to society's current focus on environmentalism. Like the John Wain poem I referred to recently (which was published in 1956, just a year before this one), Letter to The Times provides a comic look at how humans differ from nature. Why do we bother to look after roses, it asks, when they make no effort to look after us? Why do we protest the cutting down of trees, when not one tree wrote 'an angry note in its sly green ink' when London was being bombed? Likewise, rivers are dishonest because they reflect swans upside down and stars 'are even too lazy / to shine when we are most awake'. His tongue-in-cheek conclusions are 'away then with trees and roses. / They are inhuman' and that 'we should pity them no more, / but concern ourselves with more natural things'.

It's a charming and pointed satire of people's hostility to nature and on its own made looking out his poetry worth the effort. There's an interesting commentary on his work by Peter Forbes here.

Childish pleasure

Speaking of Bloodaxe, I've just been to their site and noticed that they've got a 'virtual catalogue' available from their homepage, with turning pages and everything. Ok, so it's useful to have all the information about their titles presented like that, but more importantly: what an exciting little toy!

Who needs a calendar?

The Poetry Society's website, despite the insipid blue and yellow colour-scheme of its new look, is a mighty handy resource. There's lots on there of interest, including latest news from the world of poetry and the poetry landmarks listings, which are patchy but a useful way in to what's going on in a given area. But of particular value is their month by month list of forthcoming poetry publications. It's their gift to the art of salivation, I suppose.

A couple that jump out to me from this year's forthcoming titles: a new collection from Pauline Stainer, published by Bloodaxe, with a characteristically bleak title (Crossing the Snowline) and Neil Astley's latest anthology Being Human (also, unsurprisingly, published by Bloodaxe: what with him being their editor). The latter's a likely bet for best selling poetry collection published this year and if Staying Alive and Being Alive are anything to go by, it'll be a highly enjoyable collection (although no doubt it'll also be criticised for being too popular. Sorry, 'populist').

I've also got my eye on Matthew Francis' Mandeville (Faber), which is already out. Its blurb makes it sound like a quirky and absurd reworking of invented traveller's tales from the Middle Ages. Which can't be a bad thing.

Worth keeping your eyes on that link from time to time, anyhow.

Great Poets of the Twentieth Century: No. 3 - Sylvia Plath

There are two things that it is almost impossible to avoid mentioning when writing about Sylvia Plath, a fact which tends to constrict discussion of her work. As a result, Plath tends to be treated as a tragedy or a battleground, rather than a poet. This is unfortunate not just because it gets boring, but because it distracts from her work.

And what visceral, unsettling, forceful poetry it is. Plenty of poets turn up the emotional volume or try to unsettle the reader: for all the familiarity that comes with her work's fame, Plath is still unique as a poet who can make me feel physically sick with the strength of what she's writing. Margaret Drabble's comment that she wrote from the body (like her striking opening that 'Sylvia Plath was the first poet to write great poetry about childbirth') is an important observation. She also forces the reader to read from the body, as well. The images are physical and immediate and connected by emotional associations rather than cool logic. (Icy logic, sometimes, yes). It is unfortunately that the term has been so misused (and associated with negative overtones) because her poetry is, in a real sense, hormonal: the all-encompassing emotional response of the body's most forceful way of communicating with itself.

Everything is focussed on maximising her impact: her stripped, pounding verse forms, her reuse of striking imagery, the preponderance of imagery in general. And also, a disturbing habit of using race and racism for shock value. This can leave a nasty taste, for example when in Daddy she identifies with Jews using the most startling stereotypes ('with my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck / And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack / I may be a bit of a Jew'). It's not just T S Eliot who can engage in racial stereotyping, it seems. It should be seen as a part of her method, however. Showing a lack of empathy, yes, but race is used as another shocking image to convey her own emotional horror.

This is just one more way in which her work feels radioactive: energetic, powerful, a defining force of the mid-century and subject to mathematically strict laws of decay. As Beckett said about Joyce's Finnegans Wake:

Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear.

Our dear dumb friends

As previously mentioned, I was struck with Auden's poem Secrets in the Great Poets selection and also noted the influence of his voice on Larkin. In fact, Auden was an influence on other poets from the Movement as well, as the similarities between the last stanza of Secrets and the following poem by John Wain shows.

The joke, which we seldom see, is on us:
For only true hearts know how little it matters
What the secret is they keep:
An old, a new, a blue, a borrowed something,
Anything will do for children
Made in God's image and therefore
Not like the others, not like our dear dumb friends
Who, poor things, have nothing to hide,
Not, thank God, like our Father either
From whom no secrets are hid.


Sonnet

An animal with a heart (in the ordinary sense
of the expression) would find the going tough,
no doubt of it. Birds, to get enough
to eat, would have to peck - with no defence
against the bully Conscience - worms they were
sorry for. Dear me! And cats would shed
very hot tears for little mice, quite dead;
digested, indeed; and hedgehogs would pay dear

for beetles crunched while happily at play,
and so on, ad lib. Yes, if they had hearts (in
the ordinary sense) and yet still had to eat
and copulate, despite their sense of sin,
they'd be human, just like us, wouldn't they?
But our hearts beat and ache. Theirs only beat.

Meeting half way

Train chaos this weekend (surprise), with the result that I'd read the poetry I'd taken with me by the time I got to York. Not to worry - I nipped into Borders and scanned the shelves in the poetry section. Now, I'm not likely to struggle to find something there to interest me, as may be obvious. But I was struck by the extent to which finding the books on offer interesting depended on my knowledge and enthusiasm, rather than any particularly compelling presentation. If I didn't recognise the names, one slim volume with blurb would seem much like another.

In the end, I settled for Daljit Nagra's Look We Have Coming to Dover! and Jamie McKendrick's Crocodiles & Obelisks. Largely based on the writer's reputations and what I've read of them already, but partly based on great titles and (in Crocodilse & Obelisks' case) one of the most beautifully coloured covers I've seen in ages. When choosing books, I reserve the right to be shallow - not that I think there's anything shallow about liking beautiful things...

It's not just poems which have titles

While writing that last post, I was tempted to write 'George Gordon' rather than 'Lord Byron': it seems wrong to persist in using members of the aristocracy's titles when writing about poetry. But in the end I didn't, for the obvious reason that it wouldn't have been clear who I was talking about, so 'Screaming' Lord Byron it is. But my cap remains firmly undoffed (admiration for his poetic technique aside, you understand).

Intruiging further comment on the great man's name here. Seems it was more complex than I realised, but perhaps George Byron will do as his man-of-the-people name.

Great Poets of the Twentieth Century: No. 2 - W H Auden

I had an odd experience with Auden once. Recommended him by a friend with dependable taste, I took his Collected Shorter Poems with me on an eight-week holiday as the only poetry I packed. (You can imagine the airport security: 'Careful, this one's packin' some poetry'). Anyhow, after detailed rereading of the book I was impressed in parts, but puzzled at my friend's enthusiasm. I challenged him about it on my return. 'Me, recommend Auden? Unlikely: I don't like it', he replied. I was, to put it mildly, even more perplexed.

This, I'm sure, is a much more straight-forward way to meet Mr Auden. Particularly so thanks to the graceful introduction by Rowan Williams, which addresses complex and sensitive issues of politics, sexuality and religion with a light but clear touch. He's got a distinctive prose style, too: sentences with multiple clauses which often start with a parenthesis but which nonetheless are perfectly lucid. The light qualifications of his remarks seem a mark of modesty and scrupulousness, rather than obscurity.

From the outset, he makes the clearest case for Auden's distinctiveness:

'Two things often said about great poets are that they create the taste by which they are appreciated, and that they have the capacity to constantly reinvent themselves. Auden illustrates these features perhaps more dramatically than any other of the great names of the 2oth century'.

It's these, too, that make him so difficult to get a handle on.

His overwhelming importance to his contemporaries in the '30s is, to my mind, baffling. His distinctive, thoughtful, voice sounds more like that of an interesting outsider. Obviously, his form at producing startlingly resonant poems (for example Musee des Beaux Arts, included here) would push him to prominence. But arguably one of Larkin's greatest achievements was to find a way of incorporating that discursive, analytical voice of Auden's in a way that neutralised its tendency to bleach out rounded emotion when used by lesser talents.

Talent and technique are things for which Auden is regularly praised. But I'd take question with Williams' assertion that 'the technical skill is always exceptional'. His strong use of end-rhyme with lines whose meaning flows over one to another creates, to my mind, a dissonant effect: the technique is prominent, rather than deft. This can be compared to Byron, frequently Auden's model, who has true lightness of touch despite being more dazzlingly showy. Equally, the mis-placed stress in the second verse of As I Walked Out One Evening has always infuriated me:

'And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway
"Love has no ending...'

It's like a dance partner treading on your foot: 'ending'. Tsk!

There were many particular pleasures in reading this selection, however. Picking carefully back over Lullaby, I discovered that beyond it's first verse and beautiful and striking phrases ('Lay your sleeping head, my love, / human on my faithless arm', 'fashionable madmen raise / their pedantic boring cry', 'watched by every human love' etc) it does actually make a sort of sense as a whole. And Secrets and Whitsunday in Kirchsetten were both new to me (as far as I recall) and striking poems, too. The latter seems like what the American poet, Robert Lowell attempts, but done more successfully: a discursive and inclusive sensibility, taking in a wide range of subjects, voices and striking phrases and reflecting the fractured texture of post-war Europe. For that broadening of my appreciation of Auden's work, I'm grateful to this selection.

Great Poets of the Twentieth Century: No. 1 - T S Eliot

A friend's kindly passed on this series of seven pamphlets about 'great poets' from last century and I'll be writing about each in turn. It's great to see poetry being so widely distributed and I hope it's given lots of people pleasure and encouraged them to explore further, too.

It makes sense in many ways to start with T S Eliot in the series: he's got a good claim to be the most accomplished and is surely the most influential of the poets included (although arguably it's Pound who was most influential, working through Eliot). Both The Waste Land and Four Quartets stand out among the poetry of the time and his other works on their own would be sufficient to make Eliot a significant minor poet (by his own definition). That he was also a major essayist, publisher and dramatist only adds to his lustre.

Craig Raine's introduction is curious: it's a well-turned short piece that manages to approach Eliot with a degree of freshness (no small achievement, that). It also covers a range of Eliot's aspects, from the humorous (often overlooked) to the erudite (no contradiction) to the nature poet. This latter is perhaps the most striking angle in the piece and not one I'm quite convinced by. Eliot seems to me to be someone who is highly skilled at imitating the way that poets write about nature, rather than a nature poet directly. He also uses nature to get to some other point, rather than as an object of attention of intrinsic interest. But it's true that he's very accomplished at describing it, even in passing.

However, although the introduction is interesting and fresh, it does obstruct the reader at the same time as trying to draw them in. He gets a little distracted by academic and literary historical associations (it can't be helpful to refer to which reader's guides are 'required' to read Pound and Joyce, for example). Which isn't to say that the reference points aren't exactly the right ones - but perhaps he is assuming that his readers are more comfortable with glancing references to Browning than is the case? And, unless I'm huncommonly iggorant, 'The staminate and pistillate, /Blest office of the epicene' is not exactly 'easy to appreciate'.

A couple of other provocative statements which (as he no doubt intended) it is difficult to let lie: that 'all contemporary poetry when it is contemporary is initially baffling to its readers' (I'll come back to this one separately) and this gem:

'...a postmodern poetic school led by J H Prynne whose purpose is to be difficult... (not difficult to be difficult, actually).'

I'm not sure that saying it's their purpose to be difficult is a fair characterisation (though clearly, they don't go out of their way to avoid it). But the aside in brackets is a neat point which would be usefully remembered by all of Pound's (and Eliot's) heirs. I doubt whether the heavily armoured knight of obscurity J H Prynne is likely to feel such a pin-prick, though.

But enough of Mr Raine (though he once did Eliot's former job as Editor at Faber, we should not let him occupy the great man's place here). It's an interesting and rounded selection from Eliot's work. It would have been easy to have dwelt only on the big famous poems (and they are the famous ones for a reason). But having some of the shorter, more whimsical pieces does help make sense of Eliot's style when it's in its Sunday best. Even at full pitch, he's playful and (whisper it) on occasion irrelevant (which is part of the pleasure). Apart from anything else, La Figlia Che Piange is one of the loveliest poems I know.

That said, it brings me to one particular issue (admittedly hard to avoid when selecting from Eliot): having two of the first three poems starting with an epigram in a foreign tongue is a little off-putting (perhaps a note or two would have been helpful?). I suppose that feeling of frustration that an otherwise powerfully expressive poem has been held at arms length because of a scrap of Latin is an essential part of the experience of reading Eliot for the first time. But it's not very user-friendly, particularly given the distribution through a national newspaper.

Another intriguing feature of this selection which makes good use of theguardian's involvement is the inclusion of selections from early reviews. It's amusing to hear (ok I'll say it: 'the greatest poem of the Twentieth Century': there) described as 'The Waste Land an accident in which poetry has been wounded to death'. It's illuminating too; not just in a 'ooh weren't they wrong' kind of way. Eliot and his fellow High Modernists did do a lot of damage to widespread enjoyment of poetry. Some folks just don't dig that Greek 'n' Latin vibe.

There's amusement too in the statement (just listen to all the self-satisfied and consternated undertones) 'we [sic] cannot think that an acquaintance with "The Golden Bough," Verlaine, Nerval, St Augustine, Marvell, Kyd, Virgil and Dante displays any deep erudition'. Righty-ho. Still, you'd think that if he was that well read he'd realise that Mr Eliot's not actually too shabby, all in all. Doh!

I celebrate that man and sing that man...

Heartening sight on the train this morning: one of my fellow commuters reading Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. (that is, song of himself, obviously - Walt didn't write about me, for some unaccountable reason).

There is, I thought to myself, still hope. There are one or two people out there who prefer the big beardy bard to news of the McCartney divorce in Metro...

Sci-Fi poetry

Just for a bit of variety among all the poetry, I've been reading a Sci-Fi novel that I found in Waterstones at the weekend. It's the Peace and War trilogy by Joe Haldeman and very entertaining it is too.

The second volume opens with a neatly turned poem that starts 'Men stop war to make gods' and then varies that first line to each stanza until ending 'to stop war, make men gods'. I've no idea what the verse form is (do let me know in the comments if you recognise it) but it also prompted me to another observation: where are all the Sci-Fi poems? Even Margaret Atwood, an accomplished novelist of the imaginary future as well as reknowned poet, hasn't to the best of my knowledge written Sci-Fi poetry.

Though I (like, I suspect, you) shudder slightly at some of the horrors that could be produced in the name of this genre, it's strange to think it could have been so thoroughly overlooked. What have I missed?

There was Fire in Vancouver, by Sinead Morrissey

There's a poem near the end of this collection where Sinead Morrissey describes watching a juggler:

He must have practiced for hours...
...To dance the seven painted skittles
Off his fingers like that.
He has the game whittled

To art. God knows what
Anachronism he took up before...

...He knows
How we anticipate failiure...

...We are nevertheless caught

By the weightlessness, the controlled
Mechanics of air...

...We are not as far out
From faith as we were.

This filletted precis of the poem could describe Morrissey's own work. Having been so utterly impressed by her reading in Belfast, I anxiously anticipated success. Nonetheless, in the sense of practiced performance, the sense of technical accomplishment to a modestly entertaining end and the sense of someone learning a traditional skill and exploring uses for it, this poem is true to the experience of reading the book as a whole.

There's an interesting essay by Hazlitt (called The Indian Juggler) that compares juggling with art, attempting to use one to clarify the boundaries of the other. Certainly, the moments of less original proficiency give a sense of very normal poetic material being shuffled around deftly.

This is not to say that there aren't fine poems in here: Amongst Communists, Awaiting Burial and My New Angels are all well turned. And there are fine lines in others: 'The trees' bold undoing / Is no serious grief, but an accomplishment of practice' in A Performance, for example. To Look Out Once From High Windows is also an interesting comment on Larkin's loss of creativity following the poems that make up his last collection, High Windows, although one that is a little neatly comfortable to feel true of that particular case.

Overall, the book is more reminiscent of Elizabeth Jennings' little gems, such as Delay, or as prompted on the cover, the strongly placed and humane observations of RS Thomas. But it feels that she is still searching for a poetic identity and trying on a range of subject matters. In this collection the result is rather slight, though it's evident that the skill is there. I haven't lost faith, but I look forward to seeing this skill being more convincingly employed in her other collections.

Poetry's House of Lords?

One slight concern I had about the Anvil catalogue was that so much of it was written by men: 10 out of 12 poets with collections written in English and 13 out of 14 in translation.

It's also strange to read about so many books by old(er) writers. It left me wondering whether it was notable simply because most media under-represents older people, or because it really was long-in-the-tooth poetry.

Either way, the contents look very high quality, even if it does seem to have a similar demographic make-up to the House of Lords...

Anvil Press catalogue

I've recieved a copy of Anvil Press' catalogue through the post: presumably they got my details from the Poetry Book Society. I'm pleased they did and not just because I'm all in favour of poetry publishers doing a bit of marketing. It's an attractive catalogue which, thanks to the example poems for each entry, also makes a rather nice little anthology.

There were several books that stood out to me. Michael Hamburger's Circling The Square was one. It's his final collection of poems and it'd be interesting to see what someone who dedicated so much of his life's work to translation chose to focus on in a late flowering. He's definitely one of those people that I think of as 'servants of literature': the people without whom literature wouldn't be the same, whether or not they recieved the limelight themselves.

Another was James Harpur, with his collection The Dark Age. He's not someone I know anything about (though I'm intrigued to see he's got a translation from Boethius in the catalogue as well). He sounds like a serious-minded religious poet, a type which can be surprising ly enjoyable to read, even as an agnostic (Ian Pople and Goeffrey Hill are two others who I'd describe that way).

And then a Collected Poems by someone who I'd recently been recommended, by a friend whose judgement I can always trust: Donald Justice. I hadn't realised that (so the catalogue informs me) he owed a debt to Wallace Stevens: I think I've heard him described more as an American Larkin (should such a thing be possible!). Anyhow, his name seems to come up more and more and I'm sure would be well worth a read.

There was something neat and striking about the two examples for Julian Turner's Orphan Sites, too. It would be interesting to see the effect of these shorter pieces within a longer collection; whether they would seem glib, or start to take on a greater depth and freight.

Finally, The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry looks like being one of those useful monument anthologies that help set the landscape. I'd also like some more orientation around Chinese poetry, having enjoyed various scattered gems that I've read. Perhaps a book like this would help me put them into some sort of context. Odd seeing 'Jade-Staircase Grievance' in the catalogue, having long enjoyed Pound's more famous translation of it 'The Jewelled Stairs Grievance'.

There's clearly lots in the catalogue to enjoy: I wonder when I'll have the time to read it all though?

For All We Know, by Cieran Carson

This is the first Poetry Book Society Choice I've been sent. It's a collection of 70 poems, with each half of the book having the same sequence of 35 titles. Similar subjects, images and ideas recur throughout, with associations particularly edivent in adjacent poems or between corresponding pairs: it's no wonder there are frequent references to fugue.

And yet, there's a greater sense of discursiveness and incorporating new material than is typical in fugues. This is partly because of the verse form, long unrhymed couplets. It's also because the repeated subjects (violet, watches, Bach, Berlin and Dresden, The Troubles, speaking French, Hesse's beautiful novel The Glass Bead Game, Mont Blanc pens and second hand clothes) aren't similar enough to be inversions of or variations on each other, although they do work together to create a distinctive atmosphere. Here, the doubling is used not for sharpening focus, but opening up possibilities.

A particular challenge for which work very much as a whole, like this one, is to make the individual poems well formed in themselves. Whilst it's an elegantly structured collection, it's not particularly quoteable, because each part depends on the others for its effect. There are some particular pleasures with this approach: the playful reworking of one poem in its twin, for example. This is most obvious where the Edenic Apple Mac's drop-down menus are 'putting words into your mouth' and then the corresponding poem's description of eating an apple called a Discovery. The prominence of such structures and repetitions ensures that, unlike the famous description of Hamlet as ' a play made of quotes', this is definitely a poetry collection before it is a book of poems.

And the winner is...

Despite Ezra Pound's description of poetry as 'news that stays news', I've been looking for information about previous winners of the T S Eliot Prize and have been surprised how difficult it is to find details of the shortlists before 2000. I suppose it emphasises how ephemeral such prizes are. There must be lots of books of poems out there wrapping chips...

Old is the new new

At that conference at the weekend, I was struck by the importance of mediaeval (and earlier) history and literature to Welsh and Irish poets writing today. Perhaps there should be a revivial of Middle and Old English in contemporary English poetry? Simon Armitage's version of Gawain and the Green Knight is a start, although it's notable that the most celebrated version of the headandshoulders best Old English poem, Beowulf, is by an Irish poet (Seamus Heaney).

I'm not condoning the nationalism behind some of the harking back to earlier literature ( I won't be crying out 'For England, Geoffrey and St George!' any time soon) but there's something appealing about the immediacy that the Mabinogion seems to have for Welsh writers.

Desperately seeking Sinead...

I've tried to buy the last two books by Sinead Morrissey today - after the sensational reading at the weekend I described yesterday. To my horror, the Poetry Book Society can't lay their hands on them: they're being reprinted but are currently unavailable. No sign of them in Borders either (or Rumi, frustratingly). Of course, it's great that her books have proved so popular: I just hope Amazon can help...

Seperated at birth?

A friend pointed this out earlier:










Which is Liverpudlian poetic funny man Roger McGough and which is Seinfeld creator, the Enthusiasmically Curbed Larry David?

New Nashcast

The Leeds-based poet and writer James Nash, who's a friend of mine, has a website and blog (see 'other sites of interest'). More particularly, though, he produces a usually-monthly podcast. These are like a gentle, langourous and bookish version of Radio 4: he's got a beautiful and rich voice and it's all very soothing to listen to. More than that though, they contain some telling insights, especially in his interviews with writers: December's Nashcast was a crunchily political conversation with Ian Duhig: February's (out last week) is with Sophie Hannah, mainly about her crime fiction.

James is a talented poet himself (there's a poem of his in each podcast), as well as a regular compere and performer at festivals and events (including Moral Panic, of which more another time). It'd be well worth keeping an eye on his site, as well as the podcasts.

Coincidences

A few coincidences this week: I was reading in the Poetry Book Society quarterly bulletin the other day about Sean O'Brien, which included his poem Habeas Corpus. That evening, my poetry group was cancelled and instead, some members met at a reading that was on in Sheffield that night: by Sean O'Brien. Among the poems he read was Habeas Corpus.

Also in the bulletin, because his book For All We Know was the latest Choice, was Cieran Carson. And who should be reading at the conference I'd been invited to that following weekend but Cieran Carson.

And then who was the highlight of that conference, but Sinead Morrissey: the same Sinead Morrissey who was ackowledged at the end of Cieran Carson's For All We Know, thanking her for editorial support.

It's a small world, poetry.

Who put the M in Belfast?

I've just returned from the Belfast Meets Wales conference, run by Academi in Belfast. It was an stimulating idea juxtaposing Welsh and Irish literature and there was far too much of interest to describe in one go. However, there was one particular highlight.

I'd been looking forward to the tri-lingual poetry reading, despite the name suggesting that I'd only get to appreciate a third of it, for several reasons. Other than the venue (the beautiful Queen's University) those reasons were the poets: primarily Cieran Carson and Gwyneth Lewis, but also the chance to hear a few other names with which I was less familiar.

I was reading and enjoying Cieran Carson's book over the weekend, and he came across well as a likeable, charming and serious character. I had also enjoyed hearing him perform with a band on the previous evening, enthusiastically whooping along to Gaelic singing - and sure enough, the flute was produced again to introduce and play out this event. But these moments of eccentricity and a startling translation aside (a poem in which a human and horse effectively swap eyes because of the human's empathy for the beast), his works didn't grab me as much as I'd expected. He also didn't read from For All We Know, which would have been interesting for me, given that I was reading it.

My other anticipated highlight, Gwyneth Lewis, wasn't able to be there: a more than minor alteration to the bill, whatever the organisers claimed. This left the onus on the other poets performing. Poetical posturing and self-reverence aside (and that's a very generous blind eye, as the conversation in the bar afterward attested), most of the other poets were, I thought, very competent. All managed to get their words across the empty no-man's-land between themselves and the audience both audibly and articulately (and not just when ranting about cling-film, as in one theatrical example). A simple enough challenge, perhaps, but not one universally achieved at the open mic the night before.

So far, so fine - until the true star of the show stepped up. I had an inkling of hope that Sinead Morrissey would be worth hearing, from reputation, but didn't know much about her.

She was dazzling. Deliberately pressing each word into the air with softly spoken assurance, this small figure, hunched inside a pale jacket, had the audience captivated. Her first poem was a fairly slight, if clever, response to the titles of York Mystery Plays and the guilds that supported them. But after that, her writing was inventive and assured, for example when imagining her son's experience of the world as a one-year old. I noticed myself relaxing even when she was heading down an apparently predictable route with images, confident that she would veer away from obviousness and delight me with her fresh descriptions. It made me realise the trepidation that I often feel at readings, suggesting that I don't trust the poets not to stumble through the web that they are weaving. But Sinead Morrissey didn't put a foot wrong - balancing confidently along her lines as if in point shoes. I've rarely been that taken with a poet's work on first hearing and I know that many others there agreed.

I was so forcefully struck with her talent partly because her balance of delight in intelligence, inventive imagery and literary and conceptial subjects particularly appeal to me. Nonetheless, it's hard to see how anyone who likes poetry wouldn't like her work. And more than that, I immediately thought of how much some friends of mine who have a similarly-aged child would love her insights, regardless that they aren't regular poetry readers. This suggests to me that her appeal could be very broad indeed.