A little bit more about me: My name is Bryan Neville-Lee and I am a deliriously happily
retired person who lives in Worcester, U.K.
When working, I was in the Insurance industry. I worked for Eagle
Star (now part of the Zurich Group). This was in the days when people tended to stay with the same employer for as long
as they were wanted and for most of my working life I was a dedicated "Eagle Star Man".
I have no academic
qualifications which would justify my speaking on poetry, but I bring a life-long love of and enthusiasm for the art to my
poetry presentations and a deep and heart-felt conviction that the only way truly to enjoy poetry is to hear it spoken out
loud. Poetry is a spoken rather than a written art form and it should be declaimed by someone
who has immersed his or herself in the work. I deliberately avoid learning the poems by heart because I believe that
reading them anew each time I deliver them, brings a freshness to the presentation which would otherwise disappear.
A word of warning here: being of a certain age and somewhat set in my ways, I am sufficiently old-fashioned to believe
that the best poetry tends to rhyme and above all to scan. This means that my presentations include
few, if any, of the more modern, free format poets. I have always taken the view that, to declaim poetry really well,
the performer must really like the poems he addresses and the poems which I love best are those that rhyme and scan.
Old-fashioned? Maybe, but I know what I like.