JAMES Fenton, a poet with a passion to break down the boundaries between verse and song, opens Ledbury Poetry Festival today (Friday).

He returns to the festival to read from and discuss The New Faber Book of Love Poems, which he edited, at The Community Hall, at 5.30pm.

The former Oxford University professor of poetry is currently putting the finishing touches to a version of Don Quixote, which he hopes will have its premier at Stratford, complete with songs.

His love of song should come as no surprise to anyone who witnessed his first appearance at Ledbury, where he owned the large stage of The Community Hall with highly animated recitals of rap-inspired classics, including his Ballad of the Shrieking Man. This he describes as "my Kubla Khan", in that the words came to him in a vision, while he was in Paris, and he battled to regain the words in his waking hours. Unlike Coleridge, however, he succeeded in completing the work, History is important to someone who was a journalist for The New Statesman in Vietnam and Cambodia.

In the poem, Wind, he describes time as "the beautiful catastrophe of wind", which creates and destroys kingdoms.

In A Staffordshire Murderer, he uses details of actual murders, combined with the Lichfield where his father still lives, to create an atmosphere of menace, history and also humour.

But he is also a writer of memorable love poetry, including Fireflies of the Sea, which has just been set to music as a pop song.

Mr Fenton never turns down musicians if they want to make songs of his words and sometimes the results can be startling.

One of his best-known works is the sardonic and bitter-sweet In Paris With You, and he was surprised recently to get a Dutch country and western version through the post.