There are performers and there are poets, and there are performance poets. Neither Jean Stevens nor Mike Harding fall directly into the latter category, though Friday night's poetry event at Settle's Victoria Hall was enhanced no end by the fact that both are experienced performers: the former as an actress, the latter as a renowned folk musician, songwriter and comedian.

Performers know how to employ lacunae for best effect, how to reinforce an emotional response in the receptive audience's collective imagination by standing back from the text where necessary. And performers are not generally poets, although they are often adept at reading the work of those retiring, introspective types who are.

It is refreshing, therefore, to find the actor, and the folk commentator and erstwhile comedian, giving lively and intuitive renditions of their own recent work before a full house, in this lovely creative space, the oldest home of Music Hall in England.

Organised by the Settle Sessions poetry group to coincide with the launch of Jean Stevens' new book Driving in the Dark, this evening of poetry, and anecdotal commentary on the contextual backgrounds to the poems and the lives of the writers, looked effortless from the perspective of the balcony, and was a fine tribute to their respective skills.

Better known as a stage performer, radio broadcaster and writer of highly engaged, and engaging, books of all shades, local resident of forty seven years standing, Mike Harding's, sense of poetic timing has been honed over many years of declamatory stand-up.

And very effective it is. The form and themes of his poems dovetail neatly with his direct style of presentation, which is as accessibly genial as you might expect from a seasoned entertainer.

The poems, mostly taken from his recent and deeply affecting collection, Fishing for Ghosts, polish the occluded glass of memory to reveal an astonishingly lucid cache of sometimes painful, often warm, occasionally acerbic, and always sincere, images of a life's experience.

Honesty to purpose is Mike Harding's modus, and we are moved, by turns, to laugh at, to endure, and to fully immerse ourselves in, those experiences along with the poet.

From the personal to the universal, the poet delves deep into the maelstrom of memory and finds, there, profoundly moving recollections. The harrowing detail of his mother's decline into dementia is persuasive because faithfully accurate to experience, whilst a considered poem about the seminal black and white newsreel of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and the bulldozing of bodies, is a study in human dignity.

Humour, of course, is never far from a writer who accumulates the warmth and wisdom of local nuance like an itinerant searching for home. Mike Harding's rendering of the sardonic comedy of Ribblesdale 'characters' is intuitively recognisable, and replicated, if less so these days, all over the Dales. As, elsewhere, is the picture he paints of the wonderfully rounded and 'feck'-ridden Irish builder who 'builds' unintended hilarity into everything he utters.

Jean Stevens is a nice foil to Mike Harding's comedy: bringing to her reading a clarity of tone and measured diction which tease the very best out of her poems of love and loss and yearning, she gives the listener time to reflect.

And reflection is what her poems demand - time to consider the darker emotional resonances which infect the spaces between her words: the isolated unexplained journeying, the strange visitations, the nocturnal messages bearing darkly sickening news.

And above all, her rendering of what the Spanish poet, Lorca, called Duende - those heightened, intense moments in which the world, in all of its fabulous, unknowable newness, is revealed to us.

The inclusion of sterling vignettes from two further local writers - Hilary Holdsworth and Gemma Reid - completed an evening of fine entertainment, and this commentator, at least, was left wondering why poetry performances of this quality are not more mainstream.

www.settlesessions.co.uk
Driving in the Dark is published by Naked Eye
Fishing for Ghosts is published by Luath Press