Julia Copus and Christopher Reid, Cheltenham Literature Festival, October 11.
I've been noticing in recent years how my favourite poets don't extend beyond an age limit of only a few years younger than me, say born 1965 or thereabouts. And inevitably, the list is getting older and gradually dwindling.
So I'm glad that Julia Copus can be added as an obvious star of her generation and that she was in Cheltenham, like just about everybody else with a new book to promote.
She is a fine reader of a poem. Not all poets are but it must be a great help when one's poems are such sure things on the page to deliver lucid readings to those who might not know the poems already. She began with the poems from the start of her book, just as I had been reading on the train and so it was good to hear them done properly in their authentic voice so soon after reminding myself how much I liked them.
We learnt some useful background, as well as that the 'mirror' poem is properly now called a 'specula' poem, the Latin for mirror. My suggestion that the form would come to be known as a 'Copus poem' has unfortunately already been suggested by the Poet Laureate so I'm badly placed in any claim to have coined that phrase.
Twenty minutes is a long enough slot in which to listen to many poets but all too short a time for others and I'll hope to be seeing Julia again, as it were.
Christopher Reid's new book, Nonsense, contains narrative poems including an account of a recently widowed academic's time at a conference on futility and 'nonsense'. It's hard to think where some writers get their ideas from, Prof. Reid having explained that his brief academic career was not happy. It's an easy target, an academic conference about nonsense, but his extract was accurate enough and genuinely entertaining, transposing into the minor key of A Scattering gently and sadly to finish. In a couple of lines, Reid sang the quotes from the French songs and, on that slim evidence, it might appear that he has a tenor voice that might offer him an alternative career if ever he wants to try one.
A poetry reading can be a dreadful thing- and I have been to a few that were- but with the right performers, compared to a full orchestra, all the rigmorale of a stadium rock concert or the long hours required to make a film, it can also prove that less certainly can be more and two poets simply reading from their books, at an unarguably good value entrance charge of nothing at all, it can be a wonderful thing, too.
