Postcard from Ilkley: Fists sculpted in the air: Masks with open eyes: Michael Glover sees Tony Harrison and Brendan Kennelly read their poems

NO matter where you see him, Tony Harrison always seems to be en route to somewhere else - dishevelled, restless, in shoes that look scuffed and tired from overuse. Last weekend he had taken a break from editing his forthcoming Channel Four film about 'democracy' in the 'new' Russia to appear at the Ilkley Literary Festival in West Yorkshire, his heartland. He introduced cinema screenings of his two most recent film-poems for television, The Gaze of the Gorgon and Black Daisies for the Bride, and gave a reading from his latest book of poetry.

It's all work, work, work with Harrison. He never seems to stop - from play to film to opera to book to play again. There's no discursive prose, no chat about poetry. It's always the many, various masks of poetry itself. The only time, interviews apart, he does allow himself to talk around the subject is at readings such as this one.

Like Bunyan's Pilgrim, Harrison comes onto the stage bearing his life's burden on his back: an old Karrimor rucksack in which he keeps his many notebooks, large, medium and small, of work in progress. Once he lost it, but that's another story. Why does he write in so many different forms? He explained.

'It's to do with increasing the expressive range of poetry,' he said. 'When I was young, the most favoured form was the short lyric. But that's too cramping. I wanted a more public poetry, a poetry that reaches out, something that might ultimately envelop the whole community - as Greek tragedy once had.' The inspirational force of Greek tragedy is ever-present to Harrison - that way it had of confronting the most difficult and painful facts about human life, the inhumanity of man to man, with the unblinking, ever-open eyes of the mask.

The reading itself began with two of the 'Sonnets for August 1945' (part of a continuing sonnet sequence entitled 'The School of Eloquence'), which return to the scene of Harrison's boyhood in Leeds. It is the night of the VJ celebrations in the street. A great bonfire is lit to commemorate victory - at a price; the price being the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Harrison reads with a baleful, dragging punctiliousness - the voice, which hangs upon every syllable, seems to be moving through some near intractable element; every word is caressed as if this flight into cadenced language is like some glorious and wholly unexpected birth into eloquence. And as the right hand grips the book steadily - Harrison never reads in front of a lectern - the left conducts the voice's performance with fierce chops, shakings of the fist and, most characteristic of all, the meeting and forming of thumb and index finger into a perfect circle denoting 'precisely that]'

From the Second World War we then leap-frog to poems of the Gulf War - 'Initial Illumination' and 'A Cold Coming'. Harrison describes with no small relish how both these poems were accepted for publication on the news pages of the Guardian - the literary pages are all too easily discarded as non-urgent business in exactly the way that he discards the financial pages. The words come much faster now - it is the fiercely mocking, scornful, pitiless voice of that dead Iraqi soldier leaning out from the charred remains of his vehicle.

Is there to be even a moment's respite from all this unflinching concentration upon the horrors of life? After all, he confesses that 'grappling with dark subjects is a dark diet'. Yes. He ends with a desperate request from several members of the audience: 'A Kumquat for John Keats'. This is a very affirmative poem, he reminds us, a poem written when he was 'in love again'. A poem whose celebration of sensuality gives the lie to all those religions and life- denying philosophies that have used the idea of a woman offering fruit as the basic image of sinfulness. One of the most cherished memories of Harrison's own childhood is that of his mother giving him an apple. 'Then my mother gave me an apple, it was like the most beautiful thing that had ever been grown in the history of the world.' He makes a cup of his hand in the air. And as he reads, we hear him savouring the words.

Like Tony Harrison, Brendan Kennelly is a poet who believes passionately in the importance of sharing poetry with an audience. If the poem isn't shared, it is not alive. But how different the two men are in so many other respects: where Harrison's voice is baleful, Kennelly's is zestful and encompassing. Harrison savours the idea of communication, but would seldom be found at a party. Kennelly, on the other hand, would be dancing on the chair on the table in the centre of the room at any party you might care to drop into . . .

Kennelly was reading from The Book Of Judas at the Ilkley Festival, a work that would have entered the bestseller lists in England as well as Ireland had it not been published as poetry. It is in a great and continuing Irish tradition of making glorious mockery at the expense of the church, embodied in the titles of some of the poems he read: 'Christy Hannitty attended a Conference on Castration' (in Hackballscross); 'The Twelve Apostlettes', whose writing was inspired by Kennelly's hearing the following interchange between a priest and a communicant: 'What are the Epistles, my child?' 'The wives of the Apostles, father.'

Kennelly, full- and fleshy-faced, ruddy cheeked, with a froth of damp grey curls tucked behind his ears, reads the poems at a run, his eyes alight with a kind of impish mischief. It is a quick, sure, vivacious manner of delivery that suits exactly the light timbre of his voice, and spreads, by its verbal persuasiveness, a balm of irreverent humour.

And what was it like to be growing up in southern Ireland? The answer, as ever, comes encapsulated in the form of a little story. ' 'How many bad thoughts did you have since your last confession, my boy?' 'Seven hundred and fifty, father.' 'And did you entertain them, my boy?' 'No, father, they entertained me.' '