So for home listening it has to be an actor. Even that can cause problems. To hear Richard Burton read Hopkins’ poetry is to hear Burton not the poems. He obviously loved them but it is the voice you hear not the words. Also there can be a deadness to a recitation into a microphone, the ideal is to reproduce the effect of an intimate public reading, hopefully without too much audience noise.

All of the above seems to have been in the mind of Richard Austin who performs twenty-seven Gerard Manley Hopkins poems on Back to Beauty’s Giver, a handsomely produced CD. To say performs implies something of an ego-trip but that’s not what the listener hears. Here it is the words that are paramount, but the words performed as Hopkins himself might have done.

Not only that but the place chosen for the performance is crucial to Richard Austin. This is St Anne’s Chapel, Bear River, Nova Scotia, “a sanctified space whose natural ambience (including the occasional sounds of rain) we chose for its palpable sense of ‘wildness and wet’ “. There is indeed a real sense of a warm, welcoming and sympathetic space surrounding the voice, one where there is a feeling of hushed attention even though there is no audience present.

Austin cares for the words, their arrangements and their sounds, but most importantly he cares for their meaning. Listen for instance to Binsey Poplars. There the sounds make you hear the poet’s loss but even more allow you to see the trees before their felling.

Or take Carrion Comfort. Here the words seem blocks to be arranged or re-arranged to reveal a meaning being sought, not just a meaning in the words but a meaning in life. I kept hearing in this pre-echoes of a later poet of life’s bleakness with Dublin connections, Samuel Beckett.

The feelings of magnificent discovery in the way Hopkins’ words, and indeed his way with words, allows his celebrations of both nature and Christ to burst forth with joy is redolent in the readings of, for instance, The Windhover, Pied Beauty or Hurrahing in Harvest. The hills, the sky, the fields, all seem to leap to life in blazing colour.

The centrepiece is The wreck of the Deutschland and this is where performance comes into its own, a twenty minutes drama, vivid in the imagining of the wreck, tough and knotty in Hopkins’ surrounding feelings of God and his relationship with His mortal creatures. This is a reading to return to time and again, both to relish and to tease out more of the meanings that seem to slip just out of the grasp of the casual reader.

And that is one of the major benefits of having these fine readings on a CD. It can be listened to as a recital, or the listener can dip in and out, choosing their own order of listening and return time and again to a particular poem for pleasure, further elucidation or both.

Everything about this CD (except for the lack of track numbers in the listing on the sleeve) is beautifully produced. The foldout packaging is elegantly designed and decorated. The recording level is pitched just right so that there is no straining to hear the softer moments nor any danger of distortion in the louder. The chapel acoustic is a real benefit to Richard Austin’s marvellous readings – sorry, performances, because they truly are that. And thanks to all of that the person to emerge most vividly from the CD is Hopkins himself – it’s certainly the nearest we’ll ever get to hearing him read his own poetry.