Once a fiery and somewhat divisive figure in British politics, Tony Benn, with his white hair and beard, these days appears almost biblical; a prophet belatedly recognised in his own land. In front of a packed and devoted audience at the Ledbury poetry festival, the man now voted Britain’s most popular politician delivered a characteristically uncompromising list, with a religious flavour, of what had been billed as his Desert Island Poems.

He began with the stirring words of William Blake’s Jerusalem, explaining that it was in honour of his mother, a dedicated Christian who had campaigned for the ordination of women but who had left the Church when it was dithered for decades about bringing in the reform. She believed, he said, that every political issue was “essentially a moral question. It’s either right or wrong.” Benn, who has a gentle and rather fragile air to him these days, added that Jerusalem, a “lovely piece of poetry”, with its bow “of burning gold” and “arrows of desire”, summed up a Victorian view of Christianity “as an adjunct of socialism”. The former Labour firebrand, who was joined on the stage by one-time arts minister, Mark Fisher, turned next to Daniel in the Lions’ Den - “Dare to be a Daniel / Dare to stand alone”-  as a source of inspiration, provided by his father. It “taught me that you had to be prepared to accept the flak, if you wanted to say something”, he told his audience.

For his next poem, he was helped out by Benjamin Zephaniah, who was also on the stage to show his devotion to a man he described as “an inspiration to me, in my poetry and in my activism, and the nearest thing I’ve had to a mentor”. Benn said he had been converted to vegetarianism somewhat late in life by his son Hilary, another  former Labour minister. Zephaniah read a limerick called Vegan Stephen, a man who hated “the fox-hunting season”.

Possibly some of the finest poetry in his selection – and certainly in this writer’s opinion – arrived next with the words of Slow Train, a lament by the songwriting duo Flanders and Swann for the lost and mellifluous branch line railway stations closed in the 1960s: “No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe … on the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road.” Benn said he was pleased and touched by the spontaneous applause at the end of the playing of this song - led, I have to confess, by Write Out Loud’s own correspondent.

Tony Benn, not surprisingly, sees poetry in the words of both the UN Charter and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – and why not? Suddenly we found ourselves singing the chorus to The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Fisher told the audience: “I have to admit I was surprised. I see it as a bit militaristic. But Tony told me I was wrong.” After listening to some words from Oscar Wilde’s essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, we concluded with Don McClean’s Vincent. As it played the smell of tobacco filled the barn at Hellens, a historic manor house at Much Marcle, a few miles south of Ledbury. He may have been struggling to light his pipe at several times during a remarkable festival session. But the fire in the heart of the man who is now this nation’s most beloved politician remains undimmed.

FROM one hugely popular figure to another … you could tell what they think of Benjamin Zephaniah at Ledbury from the size of the audience, young and older, in the sold-out seats at the community hall. They loved it when the Brummie with flowing Rastafarian dreadlocks told them: “I’ve come to celebrate Ledbury’s multiculturalism … well, to encourage it, anyway.” Zephaniah’s multiculturalism – that “dread” word so disparaged in certain quarters -  comes with lashings of humour. In a visionary poem very loosely modelled on Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech, he proclaimed there would come a time “when all black people will speak Welsh” and play golf, and curry would be served alongside shepherd’s pie. Maybe it already is.

In a nod to the hospitality at poetry festivals, he asked: “What’s the difference between a poet and a normal person? I walk into rooms and there is mineral water waiting for me.” Zephaniah, one of life’s natural unifiers, was nevertheless happy to state his position in the never-ending page / performance poetry debate, schism, call it what you will. ‘Dis Poetry’ includes the lines:

      Dis poetry is designed for ranting

     … won’t put you to sleep

     … is not afraid of going in a book 

     … anybody can do it for free.

THE Eric Gregory awards, for a collection by poets under the age of 30, were founded in 1960 by the late Dr Eric Gregory for the encouragement of young poets. Adrian Mitchell and Geoffrey Hill were among the first winners. At Ledbury on Friday there were three of this year,s winners – John Clegg, Kate Gething-Smith, and Oli Hazzard – along with Emily Berry, a Gregory award winner in 2008, and now a Forward prize for first collection contender. 

John Clegg, whose first collection, Antler, is published by Salt, included a poem, ‘Myth and the Orchard’, in which he observed that “all myth and history started in the orchard”, as well as an elegy to the gone but not forgotten Borders bookshops. Oli Hazzard’s Carcanet collection, Between Two Windows,  consists of poems that he said were “subject to certain constraints” -  sestinas, sonnets and pantoums accompanied by palindromes, mirrored poems, anagrams, allusions and curiosities. Kate Gething-Smith had, as compere Neil Astley explained, won a Gregory award via the unconventional route of just sending a collection in, without any previous publication in magazines or anthologies.  Her rich, musical language and evocation of generally unpeopled landscape and natural life had me scrambling to note down one quotable line after another from a series of poems such as ‘Nettle Soup’, ‘Chestnut’, ‘The Swallows’, and ‘The Railway’:  “Flickering in the stockpot … smoke carried on the snow wind … silence cupped between my hands … girders resolving into briar”. Marvellous. 

Forward prize contender Emily Berry, whose first collection Dear Boy has been reviewed in all sorts of places, including both the Guardian and Observer, as well as Write Out Loud, included a poem she had originally written in 2008 about potatoes, but with the subject matter now changed to poems: “The threat of poems was constant  / … poems were going off across the world”.  And ‘Bad New Government’, which she described as “a love poem written under the Conservative regime: “Hot water bottles and austerity breakfast / My toast burns in protest.” I wonder if Tony Benn would approve? 

AN EQUALLY enjoyable time was spent listening to Jane Routh and Mike Barlow, whose poetry in many ways complements, as well as refers, to each other’s. Routh, who is also a photographer and sailing enthusiast, included a poem about navigation, ‘Beautiful Art’, a skill that she said had radically changed, like photography, with digital technology. The poem recalls the skills of “marks on paper, light, transient, erased by evening” and the joy of a “pencil, soft but finely-pointed”. In another poem, ‘The Reedbed’, that also looked back into the past, she returns to a village where her grandfather used to have a boatyard on the south bank of the Humber, and wher the creek was now silted, narrowed and shallow: “I did find the Orchards … / Executive homes instead of trees”. Routh, who manages geese and woodlands in Lancashire’s Forest of Bowland, also read a poem about her late father, who had died only a week ago, and asked the audience to bear with her if she was unable to finish it. She did complete it, with flying colours. 

Mike Barlow, a National Poetry Competition winner and former probation officer, observes in ‘The Secret Life of Hands’ how “they give you away / even when they’re hidden … someone else, it seems is pulling their strings”. Another poem describes migrated Irish islanders who find themselves in America where the roar of traffic is “louder than the sea”. In this new land “old words [are] keeping the old world true,/ while, without their knowing it,  another language changes them”.  In a poem about celebrity stars doing their bit for Africa in the Band Aid concerts of the 1980s he wonders: “Where does it go … / the Jumping Jack Flash of goodwill?”. 

TALKING of goodwill, it would be churlish to end this blog without mentioning the relaxed and warm welcome that David Andrew and I received from all those involved with organising the poetry festival on our day trip to Ledbury. The festival has basked this year in wonderful sunshine, which has enabled the provision of comfy armchairs and sofas outside venues. But the impossibly-quaint streets that house buildings such as Burgage Hall are a constant at this big poetry festival that goes on for day after day. It continues today, Saturday 13 July, and concludes tomorrow, Sunday 14 July. We hope to return for a longer visit next year. 

PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID ANDREW /  WRITE OUT LOUD