LAUGHTER, poignancy, history and beautiful, beautiful words: the warmth of an evening with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and friends glowed for days afterwards.

Organised by the grand dame of modern poetry herself in celebration not just of the art form that lies at the heart of British culture, but also the role independent bookshops play in helping to preserve its resonance, she explained the inspiration behind the tour, Shore to Shore, to a rapt audience in Corbridge’s St Andrew’s Church.

“Every writer and reader in the land is passionate about local independent bookshops, I’m sure,” she said.

“They offer us the chance to travel to endless other worlds of our choosing through the books on their shelves – they are so often the cultural heartbeat of the communities they are rooted in.”

The friends she had with her in Corbridge were Gillian Clarke, who has just stepped down as National Poet of Wales after eight years in post, professor of creative writing at Newcastle University Jackie Kay, and poet, artist and documentary film-maker Imtiaz Dharker, along with special guest Gillian Allnut.

Multi-talented musician John Sampson, as adept at jazz as he is classical music, emulsified the evening with his own brand of musical comedy, heralding the arrival of each poet with a fanfare or jig. This was a night of entertainment, of accessibility, courtesy of an art form that speaks of what it is to be human.

Imtiaz Dharker, who, someone said, ‘If there was a world poet, she would be it’, has had all of her poetry collections published by Hexham’s own Bloodaxe Books. Loss, dislocation and a sense of forever being a foreigner, no matter where she is, are common themes.

Introducing one her poems, she said: “I wrote this 25 years ago when I visited family in India. I’m Scottish, I was brought up in Glasgow, but I was born a foreigner and I have continued to live as a foreigner. Even when I was in India, I was just a visitor.”

Her father’s ardent attempts to assimilate had embarrassed her growing up.

“He tried to use the language of a local,” she said. “‘Look, hen – Loch Lomond’ as if he owned it, as if he was Laird of Lomond.” But that sense of feeling dislocated, that somehow the world was passing you by, had inspired some of her best poetry. She read Longing to be Italian.

Edinburgh-born poet Jackie Kay has just been appointed the Makar, or National Poet, of Scotland. Wry and whimsical, she ruminated over the vagaries of life.

“I was in a village store near Loch Allen. They had printed out one of my poems and laminated it. I was chuffed!

“I rang my dad and told him and he said, ‘So Carol Ann gets to be Poet Laureate and you get to be Poet Laminate?’ “ Her tinkling laughter rang out: “I’ve been thinking about what sort of duties go with being Poet Laminate ... “

But in a night interwoven with moving reminiscences, it was Carol Ann Duffy herself who finally brought a tear to the eye.

After first entertaining the audience with a reading of the no-nonsense Mrs Schofield’s GCSE, her riposte to exams invigilator Pat Schofield, infamous for having Duffy’s Education for Leisure removed from the national curriculum because of its reference to knife crime, she turned to Hillsborough and, in particular, the families who fought so hard for justice.

As John Sampson played You’ll Never Walk Alone quietly in the background, she ended with the words ‘Over this great city, light after dark; truth, the sweet silver song of the lark.’