I remember with joy reading Dylan's "Fern Hill" from the pulpit of an old and echoing church in Hereford and seeing a handful of people who were heading for the door, stop in their tracks and slump down in a pew to listen. The occasion was a whole-day, non-stop poetry festival, a sort of drop-in kitchen for the word-starved, organised by the Vicar.
Mary - that wonderful expression "sullen art" is a mischievous mirror-image of the better-known phrase "gay science", a translation of the Provençal expression "gai saber" which was the name given to the study of the love lyric at the Academy of Toulouse in the fourteenth century.
Philip - have you ever read Les Murray's "Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil". Trust me; it refers.
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