Mark Ford and Bernard O'Donoghue

A very crowded Woodstock Arms

Bernard O'Donoghue signing Farmers Cross after the talk

The Woodstock Arms was full last night, around 80 of us gathered for the reading by Mark Ford (left, above) and Bernard O'Donoghue. Mark Ford read from Six Children, including the title poem, from which I quote the first and last verses:

The first woman I ever got with child wore calico
In Carolina. She was hoeing beans; as a languorous breeze
I caressed her loins, until her hoe lay abandoned in the furrow.
...

Some day, all together, we will stride the open road, wheeling
In an outsized pram my sixth, this broken, mustachioed
Soldier whose wounds I bind up night. His mother I forget.

Bernard O'Donoghue was reading from Farmers Cross - including the poem below:

History

Then they talked together until Dunstan spoke about St Edmund,
as Edmund's sword-bearer told the story to King Aethelstan, when
Dunstan was a young man and the sword-bearer was a very old man.
- Aelfric's preface, The Life of King Edmund

Magie Din Beag, aged four in 1865,
was lifted on to her father's shoulders
at Abraham Lincoln's funeral.
Her father said to her: 'Never forget
That you were at Abraham Lincoln's funeral!'
He said it at the time, she told me, and again
at intervals throughout the rest of his life.
She told it to me in 1956
when I was ten, and said: 'Never forget
that you once knew an old woman
who had been at Abraham Lincoln's funeral
when she was four.' Fifty years ago now;
so what I say to you is: never forget
that you once read something by someone
who said they had known when they were young
someone who said their father told them
they had been to Abraham Lincoln's funeral.

Sadly, I didn't take a camera to Anna Kemp's reading at the library on Saturday - she was lovely with the children, getting them to join in and even to do a little balletic warm-up between readings. If you haven't yet read Dogs Don't Do Ballet, you should - and Fantastic Frankie is brilliant too, in a Roald Dahl-ish style.