Midday at the poetry tent and a short set from luminous poetry talent and witty TLS columnist Hugo Williams more than meets the crowd’s expectations. His work – accessible, open poems that crackle with suggestiveness and underlying complexities, exploring the vicissitudes of love, loss and relationships – goes down well, the reading ranging from the controversial and critically acclaimed collection Billy’s Rain to an assortment of pieces from his substantial Collected Poems, finding its highlight in ‘Toilet’, a humorous poem about a train journey and the thoughts of its oversexed and bored narrator.

Later, young writer John Osborne makes his third appearance of the weekend, performing poems that adopt the mundane and everyday as a springboard for deeper – and often surreal – thoughts and reflections, including the importance of drawing solace from things taken for granted; chocolate ice-cream and TV repeats of comedy duo The Mighty Boosh among them. As such material suggests, he’s also a good writer for slipping in the odd cultural reference – be it Southern Comfort or The Super Furry Animals – and this owes a certain debt to, among others, the early work of Simon Armitage. In fact, Osborne includes a poem in his set that’s dedicated to the previous Latitude Poetry Arena headliner, describing the award-winning writer as ‘his favourite poet’.

But Osborne is far from the only one enjoying Armitage’s following performance. The tent is packed well beyond its edges as festival-goers listen in; the poet’s distinctive Huddersfield accent lending an added dimension to poems drawn from across his hectically productive career: one that includes novels, memoir, plays and translation as well as nearly a dozen books of poetry to date. But it’s the insights and musings that Armitage provides between poems that make the reading as much as anything else: ‘You May Turn Over and Begin’, a piece that addresses the ‘doddle’ that is the A-Level General Studies exam, being brilliantly introduced in its underlying sexual connotations: ‘I suppose’, quips Armitage, ‘that the title’s instruction may well apply to more than just sitting the exam…’ His set finishes with the affectingly simplistic ‘Evening’, a short piece of almost universal significance that was rightly commended in the annual Forward Book of Poetry, wrapping up what is an enjoyable afternoon’s worth of diverse and captivating performances. Poetry for the page, poetry for the stage: Latitude’s eclectic line-up this weekend has been more than enough to unmake such lazy dichotomies. 


Ben Wilkinson