Last night I went along to the second poetry event at Bilston Voices. It was a little less well attended than the first but the standard was uniformly high. Peter Hill kicked off with a short poem and a long entertaining fairy tale about why the leprechauns moved from Ireland to Bilston. It was inventive and well-written and had plenty of chuckles and a few laugh-out-loud moments.
Following Peter was Jill Tromans, a writer from the group that I sometimes attend*, who matched Peter's poem/story format with a poem that I've heard her perform before but which was still pretty funny second time around. Her story, about an incident in a charity shop, was perhaps a touch long but was funny enough to carry the length - playing to her usual strengths of character dialogue.
Roy McFarlane took us into the break. Roy has the twin advantages of being a great poet and a great performer. His poetry was half and half romantic and political and, for his final poem about the man who threw a shoe at George Bush, he strode up and down the room declaiming mightily and brandishing his own shoe in the air.
After the break we had a rather calmer performance from Marion Cockin. I don't always like everything she writes but the ones she chose for last night's performance were uniformly excellent. I was particularly taken with the quartet of poems about a cholera outbreak that claimed one in twenty of the people in my home town in 1832.
Finally Geoff Stevens gave us an entertaining and humourous mix of dialect and non-dialect poems that lightened the tone considerable after Marion's relatively sombre set.
Sometimes City Voices (Bilston Voices' progenitor) can be a bit of a mixed bag. It's never bad but the performers (myself included) range from quite good to truly excellent in both the work and the performances. This particular outing at Bilston Voices was at the top end of the scale throughout. An excellent night out.
*I used to attend all the time, never missed for years, but sometimes real life (and changed work schedules) can intrude on our hobbies.
Following Peter was Jill Tromans, a writer from the group that I sometimes attend*, who matched Peter's poem/story format with a poem that I've heard her perform before but which was still pretty funny second time around. Her story, about an incident in a charity shop, was perhaps a touch long but was funny enough to carry the length - playing to her usual strengths of character dialogue.
Roy McFarlane took us into the break. Roy has the twin advantages of being a great poet and a great performer. His poetry was half and half romantic and political and, for his final poem about the man who threw a shoe at George Bush, he strode up and down the room declaiming mightily and brandishing his own shoe in the air.
After the break we had a rather calmer performance from Marion Cockin. I don't always like everything she writes but the ones she chose for last night's performance were uniformly excellent. I was particularly taken with the quartet of poems about a cholera outbreak that claimed one in twenty of the people in my home town in 1832.
Finally Geoff Stevens gave us an entertaining and humourous mix of dialect and non-dialect poems that lightened the tone considerable after Marion's relatively sombre set.
Sometimes City Voices (Bilston Voices' progenitor) can be a bit of a mixed bag. It's never bad but the performers (myself included) range from quite good to truly excellent in both the work and the performances. This particular outing at Bilston Voices was at the top end of the scale throughout. An excellent night out.
*I used to attend all the time, never missed for years, but sometimes real life (and changed work schedules) can intrude on our hobbies.
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