SIGHTS, sounds, smells and colours from San Francisco to Colwall were evoked through the spellbinding imagery of beat generation poet Dick McBride.
Wearing his customary black beret, Mr McBride read a selection of poems from the 50's and 60's, written as a beat member, while working at avante guard publisher City Lights.
Contrast was created between poems about youthful joy of city life, packed with bright colours, sunshine and cotton wool clouds, and darker imagery provoked by social unrest, the Cuba crisis, McCarthy hearings and atomic bomb.
When Mr McBride read material from his new book he said his approach to poetry had changed since September 11.
His poem of that day was a painful reminder of the power of the tragedy.
This was opposed by poems written about the Malvern Hills and Colwall; places in which he finds paradise. The fragility of paradise was underlined by poems about mobile phone masts and the loss of trees along Colwall's railway line.
At Tuesday's reading Chase head of English Mike Woods described Mr McBride as a living legend. This audience member agrees. Jo Lafferty
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