It's been hard for me to get to poetry events for many months, especially evening ones, so I've been really lucky to attend a few during the latter half of October.
The first event I attended was a Saturday morning poetry walk in Weston Woods, as part of Weston's Good Grief Festival. The walk was blessed with glorious sunshine, and led by friends-in-poetry Bob Walton and Sue Hill. I have been blessed for some years now with a very well-behaved collie in Cwtch (no offence, Ted!), so she came along too, although she doesn't much like noisy flappy hands and I think she found the whole thing, with its many stops for poetry readings, rather pedestrian.
Not that it was all poetry. We stopped by the water tower at one point, where there's a blue plaque commemorating Dwight D Eisenhower's one-night stay in the woods in a military caravan, while preparing for the D-Day landings, and imagined ourselves into the mindset of a young soldier waiting for the operation to start ...
... while Sue read the second Mrs de Winter's dreamt return to Manderley from Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca' and Marianne McAleer sang some traditional Irish folk songs.
For me, the most affecting moment came when Bob read Robert Frost's 'The Road not Taken'. I was overwhelmed by
the thought of Edward Thomas, already of the opinion that all roads led to
France, receiving a draft of that poem, sent by his closest friend as a joke (because he always agonised over which path to take when they were out walking together), but not receiving it as
such and enlisting shortly afterwards. Poor Edward, who was to die at the Battle of Arras in 1917. Poor Robert, who was to bear a burden of regret for years.
A couple of days later we headed for Wells, as the Fountain Poets were hosting Clare Shaw and Julia Webb as guest poets at their monthly gathering. And a fine evening it was too. I was so happy to catch up with friend-in-poetry I don't see often enough. I was particularly pleased with this photo, which reminds me of 'Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe' by Manet, only with more clothes and dartboards.
And the next night it was my birthday and we were at the Bristol Old Vic to see the adaptation of Max Porter's 'Lanny'. To be honest, we found it a bit hit-and-miss - it was well staged, with a great set and some fine costumes, but the pacing felt a bit patchy and the action just seemed to fizzle out at the end; in fact, as the lights went up, the man sitting in front of us, who clearly hadn't read the book, had to ask his companion whether the missing child was found or not.
