'World Poet's Tour' is just a taster for the extensive tour organised in 2005, featuring the work of two of the six poets originally touring. Tom Boll reads the work of Coral Bracho in the original Spanish, preceded by Catherine Pierrepoint's English versions, written from Boll's literal translations. Something of the translation process is enacted in front of us. Pierrepoint aimed to create a more 'flowing' version of the English. The poems are gently evasive, subtly engaging and alluring. In 'The Water of Jellyfish' - where the waters are slowly open up, as if leaf by leaf, layer by layer, milky, "white as seteel", a wonderworld through which "light crawls", a water that is "poised", alive, independent, dangerous and seducing, the poem virtuosos on the the "flashes of minnows", is big enough for the "bronze sun to vault(s) in".

Al-Saddiq Al-Radi is present to read his own poems, a translation first being rendered and read by Sarah Maguire. These are loving and tender poems, capable of exceeding their homely and affectionate locales, worthy of navigating cultural geographies - as in his early poem to the Nile. The outstanding moment of the reading comes with his 'A Monkey At The Window', remarkable in Maguire's eyes for its concern with a boy's love for his mother, but perhaps for the audience by its evocation of what his mother has made of him: "a dark storm boy... taught to swim in endless space and vastness and called him openhearted".

But why the lecterns? In a way they are comfortable for the readers. But they reek of the lecture theatre and the church, while the poems read are of the home and of the natural world close to the city.

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