Bad experiences with microphones meant that Anne Stevenson declined to use one for her reading at the Burgage Hall.

She also declined to use the stage, preferring instead to stand at audience level, for an altogether more informal reading.

"I want to be part if the masses," she explained.

Charles Bennett, festival director, could only smile and introduce "the splendidly anarchic Anne Stevenson". And so the show began, on her terms.

She read from her new collection, A Report from the Border, which the poet said represented the barrier she had reached on her 70th birthday, "between youth and age!"

The transatlantic voice did not disappoint. Drawing often on Celtic and other mythology, Anne Stevenson reveals a spiritual sense of landscape, and a taste for the desolate. At her cottage in Wales, "winter won't unshackle the dead house by the marsh".

Interested also in science, she is wary of the "false spirit shadows" of the human mind. But her best work is drawn from a net that has trawled the subconscious, in which she finds the catch of her own past and meditations. Her long Cantata on the Theme of Time is probably a masterpiece. Her account of her mother dying with cancer was especially moving, ". . . as if she couldn't bear the human touch of voices . . .she was dying at us, and dying was accusing". It was difficult stuff, and afterwards a member of the audience asked if she could fully understand her own poem.

"Can you fully understand a piece of music?" the poet asked back.

I understood enough to leave with a lump in my throat.

Gary Bills-Geddes