City Voices

"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -  only I don't know exactly what they are."

Through The Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

I know how she felt. This month's city voices was, to use a ridiculously outworn sporting metaphor, a game of two halves. In the first half we had a trio from Nine Arches Poets in Coventry - Matt Merritt, Jane Commane and Matt Nunn. Matt Merrit's subdued performance was drawn from two collections, Troy Town and Hydrodactylopsychic Harmonica. The poems he read had all clearly been very carefully crafted and polished and I'm certain that they were all about something but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what exactly it was. I enjoyed the flow of the words and rhythm of the language without at any point coming anywhere near an understanding of what I was listening to. Given that the title of the second book refers to the musical instrument that consists of partially filled and tuned glasses that are played by rubbing a finger round the rim producing unsettling and ethereal musc, this may well be the point of it. Or perhaps not.

Jane Commane was more straightforward and more animated, though at times still rather obscure. She delivered a lively set of descriptive poems encompassing little old ladies, landscapes, ghosts and Coventry. Once again I am sure that there were levels of meaning that escaped me on one hearing and that they are the sort of poems that would benefit greatly from being written down and studied. I enjoyed it though, even when, as with the previous performer, I wasn't at all sure of what it was all about. Matt Nunn, who finished the half, stepped up the volume of the performances by several notches but maintained the air of impenatrability* that had so far marked the evening.

Things became a good deal more straightforward when the young performers came on after the break. We started with fourteen-year-old Emily Oldham who gave us a confident set prepared on her iPad - a telling mark of how times they are a-changing. Her poems may have lacked sophistication but they were clearly rather heartfelt and if anything that added to their appeal. And they were a good deal better than anything in my notebooks from when I was that age. Roxy Lal followed with a nicely doneshort story which was reminiscent of the Arabian Nights - a comparison made by Simon Fletcher as he introduced her and met by a blank "if you say so" look from the author. She added a couple of nicely evocative poems to round off the set. Tom Jenkins finished the evening. He goes from strength to strength. I've seen him four or five times now and each time he is a notch or two better. He started with two lengthy humourous poems - both of which I have heard before - and both of which demonstrate his skill with words. The two more serious poems that followed - an early twentieth century Americana pastiche and a kind of love poem couched as a description of a garden - showed that he can handle the serious stuff as dexterously as the frivolous stuff. All very nicely done.

So the verdict this time round? Another good night if, on balance, a slightly perplexing one.

(*by which of course, like Humpty Dumpty, I mean "we've had enough of that subject and it would be just as well if you mention what you mean to do next".)