This is more like it. It's Saturday morning, the heavens have opened and the festival site has transformed itself into a Glastonburyian quagmire of sticky red mud. Happily, unlike at Glastonbury, the festival planners have thoughtfully provided covered walkways to ferry the soggy but still enthusiastic festivalgoers from event to event. The guy in the town selling wellies for a tenner a pop is doing a roaring trade.
But what better way to banish the weather blues than with a morning of poetry? The debate about the popularity of poetry is as old as the hills, but judging from the number of people who have turned out at 10am on a soggy Saturday morning to watch two of the UK's hottest young poets (yes, ladies, in both senses of the word) reading from their new collections, the art is far from dead.
Nick Laird is reading from his acclaimed debut collection, To a Fault, while Owen Sheers is reading from his second, the wonderful Skirrid Hill, the title of which refers to a hill perched on the border between England and Wales and is therefore peculiarly appropriate to our Herefordshire setting.
To the accompaniment of the murmuring roar of rain on the canvas roof, Sheers welcomes us to the reading in Welsh, then goes on to acknowledge the impressive turn out: "10 o'clock," he says, "is far too early for poetry".
It's not, of course, as we soon discover.
In a light voice, with a faint quaver that smooths itself out as he settles into the rhythms of his verse, he reads from his collection. While he doesn't shy away from the odd joke ("tThis next poem," he deadpans at one point, with a flick of his eyebrow, "is about castrating sheep. You normally get some guys crossing their legs in the front row."), on the whole, his melancholy poems, with their themes of divorce and separation, fit perfectly with the mood of this wet and windy morning.
Nick Laird leans over the podium and gathers the audience to him with a dark eye. He engages in less smalltalk than Sheers, but his sonorous voice is compelling and lends resonance to his powerful poems. The sound of the rain, meanwhile, surrounds the tent, sheltering us from the outside world and allowing the poets' voices to sing out amid the deepening silence within. There's something magical about this event; about the early-morning experience of sitting in the dark, the room lit up only by the glowing stage. In his poem 'Border Country', Owen Sheers refers to the quarry where he used to play as a child as "a place where we tested our voices". Here is just such a place, and both poets pass the test with flying colours. This is a wonderful way to begin the festival.
