Thanks to our lovely audience, and to the wonderful Chrys Salt and Brian Johnstone, for an excellent event on Tuesday night.
The theme of War was unavoidably sombre, but the sheer quality and diversity of the poetry read was uplifting. Interspersing poems from various conflicts, old and contemporary, with the letters home of Chrys’s son (who was sent on the Iraq invasion), was a masterstroke – bringing the topic alive in a way with which any parent or child could intimately relate.
To name just a few of the moments which will last long in memory: Chrys reading “the seven rivers of Hiroshima”; Brian telling us of the Falklands, and a soldier burying a dead comrade whose face said “don’t bury me”; Chrys’s collateral damage – “where are the meanings we had before? Gives language a bad name, does war…”; and the ultimate statement of grief: “I don’t remember what words are and how to use them”.
