Are you a florist?

Alison Brackbury and Anna Saunders at Matthew Caley’s reading.

Mark receives instant inspiration from Matthew Caley

Matthew Caley told us, ‘There’s a lot riding on you as an audience.’

It turned out he wanted a florist in the audience. As he suspected there was not; there never is. He concluded that florists don’t like poems. This was a big build up to a tiny tanka, a haiku with obesity he said.

He and Alison Brackenbury gives the kind of confident from-memory reading where the subject matter is a kind of bonus; it’s a pleasure to listen to their voices and intonation.

Alison opens with a unexpected tribute to Swindon. Not because she doesn’t like Swindon but because I didn’t expect that poem – about rock and rollers who died in plane crashes – to end that way.

Alison talks about horsey love, climate change, the spring at a Roman villa, extinction. And. No.

‘Happiness bored you most of all,’ she said.

Matthew Caley and Alison Brackenbury read at Poetry Swindon Festival, 7 October at Richard Jefferies Museum.

Chronicle by Louisa Davison

Tags: Alison Brackenbury, Matthew Caley, poem, poet, poetry, reading, Richard Jefferies Museum