25th June 2015, The Swan Hotel, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire BA15 1LN
Thanks to everyone who came to Words & Ears this week. I've read a fair bit recently about poets 'obsession' with birds and, appropriately enough for a midsummer week, there was birdsong outside the French doors of the coach house, and a flutter of many wings in the poems we heard. Guest poet Deborah Harvey (her third visit to us at midsummer) brought her own unmistakable thrum of the natural world, birds, animals and insects populating her territory (I loved her 'moth-drab matrons', 'the trickle of caterpillars' and vixens trailing their kits 'like knots in hankies'), alongside ghosts, enchantment, and rich imaginings of long-ago writers, including the fabulously-titled Dorothy Wordsworth Drops Into The Co-op. Open mic contributions were rich and varied, as always, with lots of humour. There was some audience participation with Hazel Hammond, thoughts about Stephen Payne's most-rejected poem (!), well-caught thoughts on a sleepless baby from Luke Palmer and a first-from-memory triumph from Sue Boyle - and lots more besides.
