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.