Murray Lachlan Young

Murray Lachlan Young is very tall,
but his audience is very small.

Where poetry is concerned, it's easy to see that some examples ought never be inflicted on the unsuspecting public. This is not the case with Murray Lachlan Young, who dwells on issues of greater importance than the relative heights of human men and manages frequently to be hilarious. So the size of Young's aforementioned audience is less explicable.

As Young performs from scraps of paper perched, rather appropriately, on a music stand, there's a moment in the set at which a reviewer abandons any attempt to dissect Young's versification: it's around half-way through the first poem, and it's an extraordinary relief. Because verse spills out of Young at such a rate that to confuse it with a written medium is tiresome. And dumb. A beautifully cultivated image and delivery invests far more in the verse than just the words, press ganging the sounds and spaces into doing at least half of the work.

That's not to say Young spouts rhythm and rhyme for its own sake – a gimmick to smuggle the same old laughs past a more discerning audience. A piece about Stones guitarist, Keith Richards latches onto the idea that poetry, too, might swing upon blunt, masculine riffs; a lyric, 'Is it wrong to wear the thong?' is excruciatingly funny in its crude anticipation of the inevitable rhyme with "shlong". Much of Young's performance simply could not work through any other medium.

Self-effacing in the introduction of his "dark section", Young is clearly most comfortable with the more whimsical material, so doesn't dwell, which is a shame. In a set which has a laugh count to rival any straight stand-up, Young could afford to direct a few extra stanzas towards more sombre material. That said, it's not often that the two pissed guys at the back sit enthralled by a performance poet for an hour. And such a tall one, too.