Aye Write! Thursday night's audience with the poet laureate was a genteel, gentlemanly affair, so much so that we had to be warned in advance of one or two poems that might contain "some bad language".

LESLEY MCDOWELL
Thursday night's audience with the poet laureate, conducted by academic Michael Schmidt - who, Andrew Motion confided, had been first to publish his poems - was a genteel, gentlemanly affair, so much so that we had to be warned in advance of one or two poems that might contain "some bad language".

Funnily enough, Glasgow audiences are made of stronger stuff, so nobody flinched or fainted as Motion read out Goethe in the Park, an early poem of his about a particularly rough part of London. War featured heavily in his selection, from Anne Frank's Huys, a very early poem, to Wishlist, a recent work about the death of his father, who had taken part in the D-Day landings.

"I think I felt impressed, admiring, guilty and resentful," Motion confided as he was asked about his feelings towards his father's wartime experiences and his subsequent weekend commitments to the Territorial Army. "Resentful because it the TA took him away from home so much, and guilty because I felt, even at the time, that I had been born into a comfortable middle-class home in England in the 1950s and that that was about as good as you could get.

"My father and grandfather both lived through wars. I was the first generation to go to university, not because they weren't good enough but because the war stopped them going. It's something that matters to me very much."

Schmidt asked if he was getting sentimental in his old age, and Motion agreed that yes, he probably was, but that he wasn't troubled by it.

There's always an undertone to Motion's politeness and poetry that gives you a sense that not everything is being confessed; that not everything is being used, somehow. Despite death (he also read the moving poem Serenade, about the death of his mother after a horse-riding accident when he was young), it's as though there's a sullied world out there that he doesn't want touching him, or his poetry.

He said that, for him, "poetic form manifests and reinforces feeling". Sometimes it keeps it at bay, too.