“It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.” Oscar Wilde was being ironic when he had Gwendolen contemplate the sound of her beloved’s drab name in The Importance of Being Earnest, but he had a point when it comes to composers and poetry. With their own “vibrations”, great poems rarely warrant musical interference; bad poetry, meanwhile, can resist even the finest scoring.

The venom with which Abiodun Oyewole spits “America is a terrorist”, the key repeated line to “Rain of Terror”, has startling power. The piece is an unashamed diatribe against his nation. Beside him his partner Umar Bin Hassan rhythmically hisses the word “terrorist” again and again while, behind, percussionist Donn Babatunde provides minimal backing on a set of three congas. “Take a black woman, a pregnant black woman, cut her belly open and let the foetus fall out, stomp the baby in the ground.”  Oyewole is raging and it feels good.

I first heard – or rather saw on paper – the work of Lemn Sissay in an English literature lecture hall in the late '90s. As a fresh faced first year uni student, coming firmly from the school of Pablo Neruda, it was quite a departure from my norm.

Yorkshire theatre company IOU have a tool in their armoury that most of their peers do not. It’s an open-topped bus with tiered seating, as pictured above, built in Halifax and the only one of its type, replete with headphone sets for every seat. It is at the heart of Rear View, their show which takes to the streets of Brighton and puts the participant right at the blurred connecting point between art and reality. It’s a unique experience.

Rear View starts at a barge venue in Brighton Marina. The Marina is a gaudy, ugly place of clunky, mismatched modern buildings and tacky, American-style restaurants and bars. It 100% confirms the prejudices of anyone who thinks money can’t buy taste. Today, however, this large, Dutch houseboat-style barge is a funny little oasis of artiness amidst the plastic, high money tat. Our group, is herded into a life-drawing class, which gradually, via means it would be spoilsport-ish to reveal, leads to the main event.

Aboard the bus, we strap in and put on our headphones, which play a soundtrack of ambient piano seguing into chilled, occasionally spooked electronica. The form the event takes is a 40 drive around west Brighton, stopping every now and then so that the show’s solo performer, playing a 65 year old woman looking back on her life in poetically wrought stanzas, pops up somewhere on the roadside and talks directly to our headsets. At one point she continues narrating as she's driven along behind us in a blue Fiat. Mostly, though, she finishes then disappears. The mind cannot help but wonder at the logistics of whipping her around ahead of us so efficiently.

The show is co-written by Jemima Foxtrot and Cecilia Knapp who take turns giving the performances. It is the turn of Foxtrot when theartsdesk attends. Clad in a plain burlap-style cotton dress, she has a precise northern enunciation, a touch of the child about her voice which suits the story she weaves. It’s impressionist prose-poetry that touches on a tattoo, a song, a lost love, letters and events of long ago, emanating nostalgia and wistfulness.

In itself, in a small venue, it might pall quickly, but the way it blends with everything going on around, as Foxtrot stands at a bus shelter, in a café and so on, brings it to life. At one point she delivers a monologue right next to a very active motorbike workshop with amused geezers looking on, occasionally revving their machines very loudly (possibly on purpose!), drinking tea and chatting in the lush afternoon sun. The din adds to what Foxtrot is doing, as it’s supposed to, making the viewer genuinely start thinking about the nature of the planned experience versus the random in art, bringing to mind the ideas of Tristan Tzara, John Cage and other restless creatives who've pondered the matter.

Greater than the performed show itself is the experience of moving around, backwards, the world receding before our eyes all the time, cut off from the noise around in our soundtrack bubble (background sound is only audible during the acted sequences). The busy bank holiday streets are filled with people pointing at us, seated in rows in our bulky headphones. They wave. They take camera photos. We are on view. We are part of the experience. It is a flash of narcissism, there we are and then gone, a happening, with the lovely weather only adding to it all somehow.

Everything the eye takes in, with that soundtrack playing and the constant movement, becomes akin to a dream sequence in a film. It really does. That, for me, is the best bit about IOU Rear View. It’s a trip, in the best sense, and one well worth taking.

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Overleaf: Watch the trailer for IOU Rear View

Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Young Echo is a sprawling Bristolian collective, comprised of individual musicians Jabu, Vessel, Kahn, Neek, Ishan Sound, Ossia, Manonmars, Bogues, Rider Shafique, chester giles [sic] and Jasmine, who combine and re-combine in various permutations like Bandulu, FuckPunk, O$VMV$M, Gorgon Sound and ASDA. But here, for the second time in album format, they've put everything together under the one name and allowed it to blur together into something that is, frankly, very, very Bristol indeed.

As son of the famous Blockheads frontman, Baxter Dury has always had big (new) boots to fill. Over the last 15 years though, he’s become distinguishable in his own right for his Chiswick accent and roughened-up pastoral music. Both are just as present in Prince of Tears as they have been on his previous albums, but with friends Madeleine Hart, Jason Williamson (Sleaford Mods) and Rose Elinor Dougall (The Pipettes) providing guest vocals, it’s an album that engages with a wrenching variety of humanity's different sides, often more shade than light, rather than being just about the music.

Single “Miami” starts the album in a pleasantly plodding way, sounding not unlike a slowed-down Hercules & Love Affair. Dury makes full use of the orchestra on hand as he recorded the album, with the multiple string parts giving the song (and world inhabited by the grim narrator, Miami itself) an edge of tragedy. “Porcelain” is unsurprisingly equally as fragile, the raindrop-like piano opening giving way to Rose Elinor Dougall’s sinisterly deadpan vocals, keeping the mood tense throughout. 

That’s not to say Prince of Tears is relentlessly depressing by any stretch. “Oi” has all the fun of the "fairground" side of Blur’s Parklife, with its spiralling Wurlitzer and steady beat bouncing the song along. “Letter Bomb” also manages to blast its way through several slow psychedelic choruses and old-skool punk refrains in under two minutes. This simplicity readily lends itself to Dury’s style of music.

The strongest song on the album, by far, is the title track. Dury and Hart take turns to lament the “Prince of Tears”, a man who seems to be the result of all the heartbreak found in the other songs. The pained guitar mirrors the grief of the singers, helping to send a resounding final message: Dury’s getting gloomier.

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Overleaf: watch the video for "Miami"

What does it mean to feel contemporary? Feel. Contemporary. According to theatre-maker Chris Thorpe, whose new play Victory Condition has just opened at the Royal Court in tandem with Guillermo Calderón’s B, being contemporary is a really disturbing mixture of feeling all-powerful and completely powerless.

Bard of Metroland and scourge of Slough, John Betjeman is, alongside Philip Larkin on parenthood, still one of the 20th century’s most-quoted poets. Hugh Whitemore’s play, part highlights reading and part biographical drama, offers a hugely charming account of a poet who, for many readers, epitomises a nostalgic but conflicted view of England.

Is there something about the recessive life of Emily Dickinson that defies dramatisation? I'm beginning to think so after A Quiet Passion. The Terence Davies film may attempt a more authentic take on the unrelievedly bleak, and also great, 19th-century American poet than the stage vehicle about her, The Belle of Amherst, now long past its sell-by date. But whether serving a film biography or a solo theatre venture, Dickinson seems somehow to elude aesthetic capture, or maybe it's just that she turns out to be as oblique as the landscape of her most enduring poems.

On the face of it, Dickinson might seem well-matched to Davies, the English writer-director whose penchant for penetrating studies of anguished women (The Deep Blue Sea, Sunset Song) ought to place Cynthia Nixon's performance in  a recognisable spectrum, of distant voices and still lives.Instead, Davies's screenplay is remarkable mostly for an archness and artifice only partially redeemed by several of the performances. To be sure, Nixon is entirely committed, but Jennifer Ehle is just as captivating as Emily's more spirited younger sister Lavinia. There is a grave beauty to the whole that approximates in visual terms to something of the poetry's eloquent formality. Here's just a taste of Dickinson's unyielding language, taken from the end of one of her most celebrated anatomies of trauma: "As freezing persons, recollect the Snow – / First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go – ".

One can imagine the frisson that might have been generated had Dickinson ever been handed over to the likes of Robert Bresson – and a younger Isabelle Huppert might have displayed just the right ascetic severity for the character. As it is, Nixon brings an indrawn intensity to the role of this housebound visionary who is heard at one point commendng poetry as "my solace for the eternity that surrounds us all". Not the sort of person, then, with whom you're likely to nip out for a digestif (or even a Diet Coke). Keith Carradine, The stultifying family dynamics find Nixon's ever-determined scribe attempting to hold her own alongside a feckless and uncomprehending brother (Duncan Duff) and a stern-faced father (pictured above, sporting killer sideburns). Only Lavinia seems to have a handle on her sister as both aesthetician and human being. Such filial warmth as exists cannot prevent Emily's retreat from the world, but not before she is seen clinging to grammatical propriety like some lone survivor of a typographic Titanic.

First encountered in school-age solitude (and played by Emma Bell) before Nixon assumes the role, this Dickinson is always the brightest person in the room. That's a major reason why you can't help but feel she would have been unimpressed by the faux-Wildean wordplay of her great friend, Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey). In the end, one is drawn primarily to the rigorous beauty of the European locations that stand in for 19th-century rural Massachusetts and to the power of Nixon when she can drop having to act Emily as a person in favour of simply living with her language. At such moments, we're gloriously reminded of that quintessentially Dickinsonian carriage that held "not just Ourselves", so the poem tells us, "but Immortality".

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for A Quiet Passion