Voices of Poetry 2015

The annual Voices of Poetry evening in the BSR last Saturday night was again lovely: 50 minutes of listening to excellent language in many tongues, expertly marshalled by Mr Ronan Swift.

He opened proceedings himself (fresh off the cricket pitch) by reading Simon Armitage's 'The Catch' (a former Poem of the Week). He was followed by Johnny Pollock, reading his own piece 'Sensing', and among the succeeding poems were ones in Polish (Heinrich zu Rantzau), French (John Clarke), Spanish (Nadia Al-Lahiq), German (Klara Schuster), Latin (Nikolaus Eggers), Portguese (Bethany Shiell), Romanian (Arantcha Giolgau), Catalan (Javier Ferrer), Italian (Gordian Fuchs), Ukrainian (Iryna Byshenko), Korean (Suji Frankel), Arabic (Robbie McDonald), Urdu (Hussein Khan), Irish (Ally Boyd Crotty) and Japanese (Sun Woo Park).

Interspersed with all these were poems in English: Samuel Clarke read Francis Ledwidge's 'The Lost Ones'. Tania Stokes read 'Tarzan's Pool', part of her recent Junior Poetry Prize-winning portfolio. The Sub-Warden read Michael Longley's moving 'Ceasefire', Blanaid Sheeran her Poetry Aloud entry 'Business Girls' by John Betjeman, Senior Prefect Arthur Moffitt 'Sea Fever' by John Masefield and finally Eliza Hancock read Clive James's lovely 'Japanese Maple' (recently on the Mock English paper) from his new collection Sentenced to Life.