91Èȱ¬

Saturday 27 November
Y Drwm, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

Another veil of snow, and all has turned to ice. It's very, very cold. People phone: 'Is the reading still on? Are you going?' Of course! Try and stop me.

The Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, is on the train from Manchester. The coldest November for decades would not stop her keeping her promise. The car takes the first icy hill in the helpful tracks of tractors. After the mile to Post Bach, the A486 is clear. Kites are aloft, flying in pairs and in fours, scanning the land for carrion.

David drops me at the library and goes to meet Carol Ann's train. Aberystwyth looks gorgeous, the town spread below, the great library building high above the sea, the curve of Cardigan Bay against miles of snow covered mountains. We take it in joyfully, then retreat for a warming bowl of broccoli and stilton soup, bread and cheese, in the National Library café.

The Drwm is drumming with life as we enter. The audience applauds, and I feel like applauding them too for coming through ice and snow to be with us. Fifty per cent of the atmosphere of every good poetry reading is created by the audience. The circular shape of the Drwm helps too, a cosy, enclosing arena that seats 100 people.

Rocet Arwel Jones introduces us eloquently, and Dafydd John Pritchard reads a special poem written in response to Carol Ann's The World's Wife. The perfect Welsh introduction. A full house, an audience alert to the movements between solemn and light moments. These are what a good audience gives to make a warm afternoon in a cold world. We rise to the occasion, enjoying ourselves.

There is no strain in communicating music, meaning and perhaps magic to such a gathering. Carol Ann reads some of her innovative new bee poems, the movingly beautiful elegies and remembrances to her mother, poems of war (Afghanistan, and older wars recalled). Her litanies come close to inventing a new form, using a historically sacred form to weave the ordinary with the epic.

The audience love John Barleycorn, listing old pub names, and her rebuke to Royal Mail for abolishing the poetry of county names in favour of postcodes only. Try replacing 'all the birds of Oxfordshire' etc with 'all the birds of CF11', or equivalent! Turn in your grave, Edward Thomas. I read mostly unpublished poems, a new Carol of the Birds, and a few old ones to mark the season of Advent.

Afterwards we linger to talk with old friends, people we've tutored at Ty Newydd, met at other gigs. Then an elegant bone china cup of tea and a slice of home-made lemon cake with friends in St David's Road, and off to the station for the little train which will carry Carol Ann across the icy map of mid-Wales, where, in the night, the temperature at Llysdinam plunges to -18 celsius.

Another typical Welsh gig, as Carol Ann would say.

Gillian Clarke
National Poet of Wales

Gillian Clarke is blogging for the 91Èȱ¬ during her seven-date poetry tour of Wales, which runs until 10 December 2010. For more information on the visit the Academi website.