REVIEW: Wendy Cope.The Ledbury Poetry Festival. Ledbury Community Hall. Sunday July 1.

WENDY Cope is possibly the most accessible poet writing today.

Although her themes are frequently autumnal and reflective, they are lightened with wit, which makes her appeal cross-generational, at least to some degree.

Cope sat on the stage of Ledbury's Community Hall as a genial spirit, comfortable in her skin by the coffee table with its jugs of water, on a humid day in Ledbury; and it was easy to warm to her poetry, and also her personality. Not too long ago, she could have been the Poet Laureate; but by her own choice, that post was not for her. That may be poetry's loss generally, because she is certainly a bridge between the often rarefied world of modern verse and Joe and Joanne Public, who are not exactly known to be avid buyers of slim volumes. I'm tempted to say Cope is like a Pam Ayres with an Oxford education, but that would be unfair to both. After all, they both have their serious sides, underneath their often sparkling humour.

Cope, however, far more than Ayres, is the unofficial laureate of late middle and old age. She takes us there, in the main, with steady traditional rhythms and reassuring rhymes, like a psychopomp bard who stops just short at the edge of darkness. She waits there as a rite of passage for those who are, perhaps, still too young to appreciate her fully.

Because of Copes' considerable wit, it is easy to miss the melancholy, but it is there, with lines such as "the darkness we scan like astronomers" and this observation of time and loss, expressed as a couplet: "It goes on flowing anyhow; / Daddy has no future now".

And what are we to make of poem about writing which ends so eerily and abruptly? -

"The pencil's part is almost over, when it stops…."

It is to be hoped that Wendy Cope will go on writing for a good many more years. Her latest collection is called Anecdotal Evidence, and the anecdotes are often profound.