Glastonbury Festival - Poetry and Speakers

Adrian Mitchell - Review

Adrian Mitchell
Poetry and Words Tent
Sunday

To Whom it May Concern

Adrian Mitchell, crowned Shadow Poet Laureate with a bottle of ketchup by Red Pepper a few years ago, came to Glastonbury Festival this year to launch his brand new book “The Shadow Knows: Poems 2000 to 2004”.

Mitchell is one of the best-known British poets internationally for his beautiful, lilting and lisping blues-inspired verse, laced as much with tenderness as it is with political bite. A lifelong pacifist, he has been an outspoken proponent of the anti-war movement since he started writing in the 1950s, but in today’s set at the Poetry and Words Tent he mixed tender nostalgia with his trademark challenge to the world.

Mitchell rails against intolerance wherever he finds it, from “Back in the Playground Blues” to a niftily updated of “To Whom it May Concern” (the Vietnam protest poem that made his name) and anti-war poems from the new book. Interspersed amongst these are lyrical, funny and sometimes elegiac poems about childhood, about his adopted daughter and about the state of humanity.

He is a poet who connects with the inner child in his audience, the righteous beast who will say “This isn’t right!” He is the Emperor’s New Laureate and the child who insists that nobody is wearing any clothes. “Children are the best audience going,” he says and he is right. Glastonbury is a Festival that accesses the inner child in its temporary citizens and makes them clearer-minded for a while, so it is fitting that he has finally performed here. He fully believes that his Blakean, peaceful vision is of concern to everyone; one can only wish that the whole world thought along similar lines.

A beautiful, engaging set to round off a great weekend of poetry at the Poetry and Words tent; if you missed it, you missed one of the highlights of the Festival.

Adam Horovitz
photograph by Annie McGann

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