I’d better not quote too much of this long poem – it’s still due out in the LRB – but its stanzas echo in my head as my partner, Lisa, and I drive from reading to reading and shire to shire. In Stratford, capital city of Shakespeareshire, we manage to find our way past Elsinore Brake and Clutch Repairs and Much Ado About Toys, to The Birthplace (very much reverential upper case) and find it movingly connecting.

At the King’s Lynn Festival, my disappointment at Charles Simic’s and Anthony Hecht’s understandable decision not to leave the USA in the aftermath of September 11 is tempered by pleasure at the poets who do turn up: old friends Michael Hofmann and Michael Hulse, new ones Michael Donaghy – and Lavinia Greenlaw, Kit Wright, and Christopher Reid, to prove that not all poets are Michaels. Alan Brownjohn, whom I first read thirty years ago in the Penguin Modern Poets series which so excited me as an adolescent, is there. Lisa’s travel reading is David Lodge; in his green suit, Alan might have stepped straight out of those pages. He gives a terrific reading, and introduces me to a new form he has invented, the Sherlock, in each stanza of which naïve, plodding Watson is trumped by Holmes. His ‘Seven Sherlocks’ begins:

The man in the bus to the beach was Chinese?
He was certainly not. He was disguised
As a Chinese. Did you not see how he read
His little Li-Po edition from front-to-back

And concludes ...

And the vital missing element, just
As important as the rest? – The absence
of a haystack near the gate. Had one been there,
He would have shoved our needle in it.
Then, you see, these clouds ... They were painted on the sky
In the manner of the artist Magritte. – But how could you tell? –
On longer inspection, I found crucial errors in the forgery.

Shades of Montale. This is from Brownjohn’s new book, The Cat without Email (Enitharmon Press).

Reading with such good performers in King’s Lynn, I am forced to lift my own laconic game, especially when I hit the road, reading solo. After my first reading at Royal Festival Hall, (sounds grand if I fail to add I was in the smaller VoiceBox, not the main hall), I tell Lisa that I have fooled them again. My daughter Anna likes to call self-deprecation ‘a wank with an identity crisis’, but I mean it. On the cusp of even small-scale fame, there is always the dust-and-ashes foretaste of I-don’t-deserve-this. But forced to read better each night of the tour, learning to listen to my own poems again, I begin to like them. Pure wank, with no identity crisis? Perhaps, but by the final reading in Durham I feel almost proud of my new book. The physical book, at least, is a beautiful object, leaving aside its contents – especially the cased edition. I’ve always hankered after up-market ‘cased’ editions. The launch party itself begins sedately enough with generous words from Peter Porter (have I fooled him too?), but kicks on afterwards with a push of poets (what is the collective noun – a pub of poets?) heading for the nearest, well, pub. It finishes in the larger small hours at the home of Matthew Sweeney. We eventually let ourselves out, Matthew cannot seem to move.

One of the most memorable poetry readings I have ever attended was in Canberra a few years back when the poets were asked to read favourite poems by other poets. Freed from ego, from the need for either self-deprecation or self-deprecation, wonderful discoveries were revealed.

King’s Lynn ended with something similar: Brownjohn on Thomas Hardy, Anthony Thwaite (Larkin’s executor) on Larkin, Donaghy on Elizabeth Bishop, Karl Stead on the sadly missed Allen Curnow. I talk about big Les, but especially memorable is Michael Hofmann’s modest, beautiful journey back through the poems of Zbigniew Herbert. I remember a night thirty-odd years ago, when someone read to me from the Penguin Modern European Poets edition of Herbert, and my life was changed – I wanted to write poetry.

I find I can still recite slabs of Herbert from memory – one of the great tests, always, of poetry. But the pessimism of the closing lines of his ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’ – ‘we live on archipelagos and that water these words what can they do what can they do’ – are given the lie by this festival, those words. Words have done their usual much.