Margaret Atwood/August Kleinzahler, Purcell Room, South Bank, London

It's hard being a poet and a novelist, as Margaret Atwood reminds us after she's walked briskly across the stage, black handbag swinging from her shoulder, hair newly permed in tight blonde curls that catch the light when she swings her head.

It's hard being a poet and a novelist, as Margaret Atwood reminds us after she's walked briskly across the stage, black handbag swinging from her shoulder, hair newly permed in tight blonde curls that catch the light when she swings her head. "When I do a poetry reading, I sometimes say that I'm really a novelist. When I'm at some reception in my role as a novelist, I might say: 'Oh, but I'm really a poet...'." The two disciplines make very different demands of the writer. Poetry is often painfully succinct and concentrated to the point of an almost shocking brevity. Good, short poems often end with a tiny, explosive shock. Atwood's, by and large, don't. And she doesn't read them with the kind of concentration that would be demanded if they had been written in a white heat. They are jaunty, sad, funny poems, but many of them seem, for the most part, and without any significant loss, to be reducible to paraphrase.

The final poem she reads, "The Hurt Child", is about an antagonistic child who grows ever more antagonistic as the adults fail to ignore her wounded cries for help. The persecuted child, in the end, dies, and the poem ends with a tiny, moralistic twist: "Its blood seeps into the water, and you will drink it every day." This material, we can't help feeling, would have been much better used, at greater length, in prose. And so it is with most of the poems that Atwood reads. They lack the real aural presence of language under pressure. Even the rather dead-pan, flat and jauntily throw- away manner of reading, the easily complicitous smiles that she tosses in our direction when this or that poem says something funny, seems to give half of the game away. This is not the best of Atwood, by any means.

The star of the evening is August Kleinzahler. There is something wonderfully engaging about the presence of the man, the poetry he's written, and the delivery of that poetry. He looks a bit of a shambles, wending his way on to the stage from some route that only he takes. He is dumpy, all in black. His cheeks bulge and shine as if they are stuffed with seedcorn. His eyes are heavy-lidded as a frog's. But the control in the voice is quite extraordinary.

The poems, as he reads them, work, word by word, and are exceptional. We hang on, and listen with the utmost care, to every single word, and he knows how to vary the rhythms of each word, phrase and line. The shifts of tone and mood are as dramatic as they are unexpected. The greatest moment is the one in which he manipulates his yawning mouth to speak in the strangulatedly plaintive voice of a dog who just happens to be a scholar of the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. The new, prize- winning book that he mainly reads from, The Strange Hours Travellers Keep, should be a must-buy for anyone interested in the wayward pitchings and rollings of contemporary verse.