The reading by Wendy Cope in the Community Hall lasat Sunday was another sell-out event for the Ledbury Poetry Festival.

I left the performance amused, entertained but strangely unmoved, like someone who had sat next to an entertaining talker over dinner, but could not recall afterwards the gist of the conversation.

I should admire Wendy Cope, and indeed I do, for certain accomplishments. She writes clearly and pays great attention to form and presentation. Her rhymes are often simple, but cleverly placed. The craft, however, is not obtrusive, and her own personality, I feel, is not allowed to invade the separate lives that are her poems. She is, in short, a classical poet, rather than a Romantic writer, and some of her pithy work would be at home in The Greek Anthology.

She is of a certain school, and thousands of discerning readers now buy her books, as thousands bought the works of Stevie Smith and Dorothy Parker.

Cope is very much the poet of the punch line and the sudden witty observation.

But her most successful poem for me was The Sitter, inspired by the nude study by Vanessa Bell. There is empathy in it and real engagement with the underdog. The model is allowed to speak, and tells us "depressed, and disagreeable and fat, that's how she saw me...her contempt for me lives on..."

I gave the best giggle of the evening award to her comic haiku, Looking out of the back window without my glasses.

"What's that amazing, new yellow flower...?" Cope asks. "Ah yes," she concludes, "a football."

There is no pretension in Wendy Cope, just a desire to please, and in this she succeeds marvellously.

Gary Bills-Geddes.