So, the Ledbury Poetry Festival has come and gone for another year - but very successful it was too. Next year perhaps normality will resume with more in person events, but a few of those at least took place this time and the on line ones enabled a very wide audience to enjoy some brilliant poetry. I particularly enjoyed the John Challis workshop I was able to participate in on Appearances and Excavations and the Gillian Clarke and Matthew Francis event in which they read from their recent publications. I have always loved the great Welsh Mabinogion stories and Matthew Francis has retold four of these in tremendous poetry; in Gododdin, Gillian Clarke has transformed the ancient accounts of the battle between the Welsh and Picts and the Angles in AD 600 with a hundred laments for named characters who fought. Word music indeed.
It's been back to the drawing board with the biography I'm working on. Following a couple of meetings in the last week or so, even more has come to light that demands space in the story. Two long treks last weekend - at the beginning of the Three Castles Walk - provided useful opportunities for a bit of reflection on things. To say nothing of prompting ideas for some poems too ...
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