In an intimate evening with Polly Jean Harvey MBE, the double Mercury Prize winning artist sang an altogether different kind of tune than you might expect.

Reading from her new book of poetry, Orlam, a coming of age story about a not-girl-not-boy, set within the changing seasons of a mythical Dorset landscape, the songs we heard were odd little twists of nursery rhymes, whisper-sung in a strong West Country accent.

Derek Owusu’s debut That Reminds Me won the Desmond Elliot Prize in 2020. When asked what it was that she loved most about Owusu’s semi-autobiographical 117-page book, Preti Taneja, chair of the judges (and winner of the prize herself in 2018) answered, without hesitation, “the form” and Owusu’s “compression of poetic language”. Owusu’s latest work, Losing the Plot, imagines what life was like for his 18-year-old mother when she arrived in London from Ghana in 1989.

Can you make modern poetry come to life on a TV screen? The BBC has had two stabs recently at answering this question, as part of the centennary celebrations for TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, seen by many as the greatest poem of the 20th century. One programme works significantly better than the other. 

There are many reasons that I am obsessed with Florence Shaw. It's not just that as a long time sufferer of Resting-Bitch-Face I identify hard with her deadpan nonchalance, it's also pure props that she's brought spoken-word-set-to-music into the mainstream.

A semi-staged concert performance of a musical is a little like a third trimester ultrasound scan. You should see the anatomy in development, the shape of what is to come and, most importantly, discern a heart beating at its centre. But you can’t tell if what will arrive some time later will be a bouncing baby or a sickly child. So it is with this iteration of a new British musical, Treason. 

Sitting in the park on a hot summer’s day, life began to imitate art. I had been soaking up the sun’s now overpowering rays for over an hour and was beginning to feel its radiating effects.

Golden green filaments of grass moved back, the trees swayed in heady sympathetic succession; buzzing from the outside in, my body started to metabolise light at a speed my brain couldn’t fathom. My skin bubbled green, my tongue unfurled petals and my eyes sprouted luminous buds. I had become a plant – or so I felt – and the sun-soaked synthesis of my transformation was near complete.

Once upon a time the Three Choirs Festival conjured up a single image, that of the English Oratorio – the grand choral solemnification of everything that was most profound in Anglican thought (though ironically its greatest exemplar, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, was irretrievably Catholic, and one Anglican bishop is supposed to have said he wouldn’t allow it into his cathedral). 

The word “shrine” somersaults me back to the path of the Camino de Santiago. I have lost count of the faces that smiled up from photos positioned in the hollow of trees, some with little plastic figurines for company, others set in stone next to a sculptural pile of pebbles. Some of the shrines also sheltered a handwritten prayer or a crucifix; most had burnt-out tea-candles.

Kathryn Williams’ creativity leaves most singers standing. She’s always up to something and it’s usually interesting. As well as multiple albums over two decades, including one themed around Sylvia Plath and another created with the poet Carol Anne Duffy, last year she had her first novel published, the ominous island-set tale, The Ormering Tides.

Time-honoured advice warns actors never to work with children or animals. Perhaps the literary equivalent should tell novelists not to invent other writers in their books. Especially poets. Unless you can command a wholly convincing poetic idiom of your own – like Nabokov in Pale Fire or AS Byatt in Possession – or happen to be a bard of genius yourself (Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago), imagined verses and versifiers can fall dismally flat on the page.