Carol Ann Duffy sashays into the RBS Main Theatre, draped in black velvet and sparkly things. After a genuine though rather weak introduction from Robyn Marsack of the Scottish Poetry Library, Duffy takes the podium next to a man with a saxophone whom she introduces as John, and announces that she's tired of being a poet and will just be doing a few jazz numbers in the bar.

Duffy draws an AGA crowd; lots of academics who I suspect of growing their own fennel, and a few self-conscious students. I'm sitting beside a curious woman in a red dress who splooshes herself every few minutes with perfume, and eavesdropping on the couple behind me who are gossiping about a Green MSP.

The cavernous tent darkens and undulates in the wind as Duffy begins. The Poet Laureate is a performer; listening to her is like being hooked around the waist and dragged sideways into one's own brain. Except it's a better brain, where the shape and sound of a word mirrors the emotion it describes - and language is subverted to the extent that the listener becomes mildly traumatised, and aroused in a glassy-eyed way that will last well into the night.

There's a fair dose of sex and subtle, domestic violence, as Duffy reads from the ever popular The World's Wife. This is what we come for, I suspect; Duffy's self-described retelling and subversion of the myths she grew up with, rewritten from the perspective of the wives. Mrs Midas taken from louche domesticity to wretched chastity and effective widowhood. Mrs Aesop's boredom and social embarrassment.

Duffy tells us that she was accosted by an academic after her first, pre-publication reading of Mrs Tiresias, who vehemently explained that there was MUCH more to the myth than Duffy had touched on; causing Duffy to insinuate that the poem would be followed by the rest of its series. The poet laureate is someone you could go to the pub with. I imagine her cackling with her friends in a dark booth over that story. She has a wicked sense of humour, as evidenced by her depiction of Tiresias' first period, which inspired a letter to the gods demanding 12 weeks of paid menstrual leave per year.

Duffy takes on the voice of Margaret Thatcher as she reads Weasel Words, and of a young man as, accompanied by John, she reads the poem she wrote for the last WWI survivors. As she takes on the voice of her own mother for her final reading, a huge thunderclap rattles the tent. “That's my bloody mother, that is!”, says Duffy.