REVIEW: Brian Patten at the Gallery Café

By mclough

Brian Patten and others,

The Gallery Café, Queen's Theatre, Barnstaple

Review: Mark Clough

OKAY, get the confessional over first. I'd never been to a poetry reading before and I really wasn't sure what to expect so, as a result, was a slightly hesitant member of the audience. Would it be like open mic night at a comedy club crossed with band night at your local pub — or had I got completely the wrong idea?

The truth is that this North Devon Festival event ploughed its own furrow — a bit like poetry itself, I guess — and was all the better for it.

Put on by Apples and Snakes, which organises performance poetry events around the whole country, the "headline" act was Brian Patten. He is one of the Liverpool Poets and although these days he hails from South Devon, his Merseyside twang is still very evident as he cracks out poem after poem.

He moved through poems for children, then on to works about the pangs of teenage years after which followed verse on the many and varied ways humans struggle to love and be loved.

All this was interspersed with tiny little poems which were over almost before we'd realised they'd begun.

While much of Brian's work raised a laugh, certainly he did not back away from work confronting mortality. These included a warning to us all not to allow fear to force us to put off following our dreams and a moving tribute to his friend, poet Adrian Mitchell, who died last year.

All headliners have their supports and Brian's were the "myth-obsessive" Adam Horovitz, Edson Burton, who told us of his Jamaican roots, and Lucy Lepchani, who, among other things, touched on the feminist debate over lipstick. The entire evening was hosted by the memorable Sally Crabtree, whose shocking pink wig must act as the perfect disguise.

What the entire evening underlined for me is that poetry is rarely better than when it is being read out loud, and that hearing it creates, for me at least, the desire to read it for myself, which, for the many poets out there, can be no bad thing.