A cup of tea is offered before Brian Mc Enery's "A Simple Session" has properly begun. "You'll have a cup of tea," Mark says, and it isn't a question. There is no "Would you like...?", only the easy assumption that of course you will. That small grammatical choice sets the tone for the whole poem, which is about a place where hospitality needs no ceremony and refusing hardly crosses anyone's mind.
The poem is built in four short stanzas, like four steps through a doorway. The first is the invitation, the second a moment of hesitation, the third the conversation, and the fourth a quiet revelation. The word "Then" opens both the third and fourth stanzas, so the poem feels like an afternoon recounted in order: this happened, then this. Nothing is rushed and nothing is dramatised.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are very short, often only three or four words, and they sound like speech. Mark's words carry no quotation marks. They slip into the narration, so that "Mark said as I passed / Down the road" reads like something half-overheard. The phrase "Down the road" sits alone on its line and trails away, as if the speaker were already walking on when the invitation stopped him. The encounter feels unplanned.
The second stanza is honest about distance: "We knew each other / But not well." The break before "But not well" leaves those three words standing apart, and the poem refuses to pretend to an old friendship. "Simple talk, greetings" describes the kind of exchange that stays on the surface. Because this starting point is so modest, the closeness that follows seems earned.
In the third stanza the language relaxes. "Cup of tea" becomes "cuppa", and "talk" becomes "chatted", a small shift towards informality that shows the two men settling in. The repeated "Talk of meditation / Talk of Wales" places an inner practice and a place side by side, with no hierarchy and no explanation. We get only the headings of the conversation, which is how we remember most conversations anyway. Then comes "Simple tales of two lives," and the poem's key word returns.
"Simple" appears three times: "Simple talk," "Simple tales," "A simple life." Its meaning shifts each time. At first it suggests small talk, then something warmer, and finally something close to an ideal. A sceptical reader might feel the poem insists on its own simplicity a little hard. But the repetition behaves like a refrain, and the plain vocabulary matches what the poem describes.
The ending holds the most interesting detail. Until the last stanza we have no idea these men are poets. That identity arrives almost casually: "Then a few poems / Two poets sharing." Even the quantity is modest, "a few", with no suggestion of a performance or a grand reading. Then "two lives" in the previous stanza becomes "a simple life" in the last line, and the plural turns singular. One reading is that the two men share a way of living. Another is that the sharing itself, of tea, stories and poems, is the life the poem values. The poem leaves the line open, and the open ending suits it better than a neat conclusion would.
The title adds a further layer. "Session" suggests something with a shape, like a music session or a study session, and applying it to tea and conversation quietly raises an everyday moment into an occasion. The poem makes no claim about the importance of poetry beyond this. It shows poets as people who knock on a neighbour's door, drink tea and read a few lines aloud.
This is what makes the poem worth reading. In a culture that often measures value by scale and noise, it argues for friendship that grows out of a small kindness. It also practises what it describes. Its plain words, unforced rhythm and lack of ornament are themselves a "simple session", and the reader is invited in just as the speaker was.