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Poet laureate Andrew Motion

NORMALLY at these literature festival events, my biro is a blur as I try to capture, in my scratchy shorthand, a gem or two of wisdom to hang my review on - before they fall out of my head and are lost forever.

But as our Poet Laureate began his first reading - a prose evocation of his childhood in rural Stirsted, Essex - I stopped scribbling and became lost in his vivid pen portrait.

And the power of his poetry and prose continued to hold me in thrall for the whole hour of his presentation.

A five-line poem about Andrew's encounter with 109-year-old Harry Patch, the last survivor of the First World War killing fields, really stuck in my mind.

With each line echoing the flashes of memory left to Harry, we were presented with cinematic snapshots of his life - from crawling through fields as a child, to the horror of watching a dying comrade cry out for his mother - careering headlong into the confusion of old age.

Writing poetry for me is an act of recovering that essence of an idea or feeling and then coming up with a buggered up version of what you first glimpsed. Andrew Motion

The mood was lightened with a good dose of comedy - including a piece in which Andrew pokes fun at himself after following a particularly bright star during a walk in Sicily - only to discover that it was a neighbour's street light.

And of particular resonance to me - and I partially blame this on the pint I had during the interval - was Andrew's simple list poem picking out a host of innocuous objects that he would have wished to bury with his late father, from a box of fishing flies to his D-day backpack with maps of Germany.

It reminded me of my father - and that to my mind is the sign of a great poet - sparking resonance with his audience.

Or to put it in the great man's words: "Writing poetry for me is an act of recovering that essence of an idea or feeling and then coming up with a buggered up version of what you first glimpsed."

8:58am Friday 9th May 2008

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