Old age, old dogs, inequality, homesickness, sunless seas, plus love and death and war and glorious mud: it was all there in the Library, that cultural centrepiece of Ottery St Mary, on the night of 18th March, an evening of almost-spring.

A quartet of polished performers led by the Colin Firth lookalike, Ian Pearce, presented all of this in a series of preloved poetry and songs. His team consisted of Steve Crump, Tim Knight and Patrick Romer, late of the RSC and National Theatre and whose voice you will have heard on Roger McGough’s R4 Poetry Please.

It was a lovely informal ‘ragbag’ event. It started with Ian reading Betjeman’s 'A Subaltern’s Love Song', reminding us of that famous sexy furnish’d and burnish’d tennis player, Joan Hunter Dunn, and her ‘warm-handled racket’. Remembered love continued with Pat performing Shakespeare’s 'Sonnet 29', ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes…’ . And Steve continued in reminiscence and regret with an original piece about the invisibility of old age: ‘Stranger, when you looked at me…' but Tim perked us up with 'Walking my 75 year-old Dog' by Billy Collins, one-time American Poet Laureate, and Pat launched into ambiguity with Walter de la Mare’s 'The Listeners', reminding the audience that poetry ‘gives you question marks’.

Another old dog featured in 'Piddling Pete', remarkably memorised by Pat, followed by Blake’s 'Little Lamb' and his 'Tyger' burning bright. Two not-cute children appeared: Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda cries wolf and expires in a fire, and the petulant Augustus refused to eat his soup and you know what happened to him.

Tim manoeuvred his way around the tongue-twisting 'Jabberwocky': twas brillig. And then we went to war. Steve read Bob Dylan’s 'Masters of War', always relevant, and Ian accompanied himself on guitar singing the heartbreaking ‘And the Band played Waltzing Matilda’, written by the Scottish-Australian Eric Bogle about Gallipoli, a WW2 battle considered by Robert Hughes as Australia’s Thermopylae. The song was later covered by Joan Baez who would have approved Ian’s version.

Tim did an emotional reading of John Davidson, someone who inspired T S Eliot, in 'Thirty Bob a Week' where ‘we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck’. Coleridge got a look-in, how could he not, and they chose 'Kubla Khan', the one nobody understands, and Ian described it perfectly as ‘pulling down the dream’.

Certainly dreaming was what Browning was doing, in 'Home Thoughts from Abroad', missing an English spring that was just burgeoning outside the Library windows. The ragbag culminated in Steve’s reading of Flanders & Swann’s wonderful 'Hippopotamus Song' which included the Cole Porter worthy-rhyme: ‘innamorata and garter’. Everyone joined in to sing the Glorious Mud chorus of course. It was glorious.

In Betjeman’s poem, the air was ‘heavy with bells’, as was Ottery St Mary: all evening the parish church bellringers practised their art which you could hear in the distance between the acts. Also glorious. The event was introduced by the Library Supervisor, Kerry Carr, and sponsored by the Friends of the Library.

Drop into the Library and become a Friend to help support OSM Library, part of the Libraries Unlimited Charity, and keep reading free for all for a bit longer.