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Apart from the monumental reading by Seamus Heaney which I wrote about last time,the most interesting thing was a lecture by Grevel Lindop entitled Myth Magic and the Future of Poetry.. Grevel has since posted the full text, on his web-site
here
so I won’t even try to summarise it, but it was excellent, well-written, well delivered, and a subject of passionate concern to most of his audience, which I liked, considering how much of a myth geek I am.

I am not sure, however, that we should, as he recommends, be using myths as a way of reconnecting with the earth. Tolkien also says that ‘recovery’ is one of the most basic functions of fantasy – if life has become dull and stodgy ‘dipping it into story’ is one way of making you appreciate the common things. And it is certainly true of The Lord of the Rings
. All those elves and monsters and magical rings, and what you really remember is the sound of a house door shutting in the early morning when the hobbits leave, or the taste of mushrooms at Farmer Maggot’s, and the runner beans in Bombadil’s wet and misty garden.

However, I am not sure that the process isn’t better the other way round. We learn by moving from the known to the unknown. If we use myth to sacralise nature (and what a bloody awful word that is) will it not lead to a romantic and sentimental – and beyond that, a self-serving view of nature? If we don’t value a salmon as a fish in a river, but as a repository for hidden wisdom, what will we understand about either fish or wisdom? Whereas if we learn about the salmon, observe it, and care for its habitat, we might learn something interesting and valuable about the world we live in, but we will be more fitted to understand the nature of all that wisdom it represents. And maybe a bit less uppity about the poet’s role as shaman and go-between. Ain’t nothing more spiritual about poetry than dishwashing if you ask me. Or less, for that matter.

I had only one day at StAnza this year – but even that’s an improvement. In the past, although I knew it was coming up, it always took me by surprise until it was too late. This year, however, I had the Thursday, because it was Seamus Heaney day.

I did go to other things – I heard Jacob Polley and Anna Crowe read and I went to an excellent lecture by Grevel Lindop about myth, magic and the future of poetry, which will need another post to deal with it, but there is no doubt that it was definitely Seamus Heaney day.

The event was completely sold out, and so were the overflow events where the reading was broadcast to other rooms in the building. It was typical of Seamus Heaney’s generosity that during the interval he went up to the other rooms to greet the people there too.

I saw him read once before at the Edinburgh Book Festival (I’d sat on the internet waiting for bookings to open that time too), just before his stroke. That was some performance – completely at home with his work and the audience and the questions, full of humour and generosity. The stroke has taken some of the strength and the confidence, but it hasn’t otherwise diminished him in any way. He read a mixture of new poems, (there will be a new book out in September), personal favourites and requests. My daughters would have been pleased that he didn’t do either The Death of a Naturalist or Digging both of which they still resent doing at school; in fact I think he must feel a certain reserve about Digging himself, because he read instead a poem where “a pen is a pen”. (I know how he feels about that one. I do still read Walking on Water sometimes, but you know, life moves on–).

There seemed to be a lot about death in the set – his father’s, his brother’s, his mother’s, and perhaps looking forward to his own, but there was also a sense of new inspiration, poems about wind and kites and healing that would lead you to think that perhaps post stroke, Seamus Heaney might be slightly less exuberant as a writer and reader, but more quietly and deeply reflective. I can’t wait for the new book.

Poetry seems to have taken a back seat lately while I have been building the Lúcháir web-site and dealing with some complicated family shenanigans. But I have been reading more – Eavan Boland, Gillian Clarke, Kathleen Jamie, Christine de Luca, and getting into Macdiarmid. A bit of a theme going on here – land, language, memory. Beyond that, I have a new respect for theory and criticism, not only because I have come across some interesting and intelligent critics – Alan Riach, Meghan McAvoy, Michael Gardiner- but because I have found a sort of criticism that is not just dissection and analysis, but which links the writing and reading of poetry to the experience of living, and, instead of slowing you up, making you cynically aware of tricks and techniques to practice or inhibits creativity, sparks off new ideas, new connections, new poems.

All of this is very exciting, and usually the effect of being excited is that I buy lots of books, read lots of first chapters and finish up in an exhausted heap of poetry fragments that result in three poems five years later. Not so much this time – the theory is like a good conversation which keeps me focussed and grounded, and I now have two different but related projects taking shape.

One is the ‘saracen’ outlaw woman who has haunted me for at least the past ten years – the Polly Oliver,the girl who dresses as a boy in order to become a soldier, the selkie shape-shifting between human and seal, Baba Yaga a cannibalistic ‘bad mother’ or wise woman, depending on who you are, the Black Madonna (why does it matter to Spanish or Austrian communities that she is black?), Hestia (who is she and why does she matter so very much?)and the Sheila n-a gig a thoroughly irreverent fertility goddess,apparently. One of the ‘saracen’ poems “The Bower” will appear in Poetry Scotland shortly.

The other is ‘hohokam’ – the name of a native American city that was abandoned just before Europeans showed up. Apparently the name its survivors gave it means ‘all used up’. I’m thinking a lot about erosion, fossils,decay, abandonment and survival/regeneration.

Remember back in November I said Nobody any good is allowed to bring out a book until the start of the next financial year!. Well, a lot of good that did me. Fortunately I’ve had a birthday, and people who know me know enough to give me book tokens, so in spite of Lynn Moir’s pamphlet coming out, and the imminent arrival of pamphlets by Geoff Cooper, Judy Taylor and Juliet Wilson, I was able to conduct a raid a couple of weeks ago on Waterstones in Glasgow. It is my impression that they seem to be trying harder with the poetry these days, and I was hard pushed to keep within my budget (failed, actually, but then I knew I would).

Among the bunch was a pamphlet in the Faber New poets series by Fiona Benson. I met Fiona at Lumb Bank last year, and though there were several interesting ’emerging’ poets there, Fiona struck me as being one who stood out for the concentrated power and physical texture of her work.

She has Scottish connections, as she completed the MLitt in Creative Writing and a PhD on Ophelia as a dramatic type at St Andrews university, where she edited The Red Wheelbarrow.

This is a small collection, only seventeen poems, but each one pulls its weight, giving the pamphlet more good poetry to the square inch than many larger works. Fiona Benson deals a lot with love, sex and death, memory and premonition, and the ‘times between’ times. Images of fertility, healing and decay are frequent – a bird skeleton, spawning fish, the Hungerford Bridge ‘the simple stitch/heals the breach of the river’, but also the outdoors, gardens, coasts and cliff-tops, references to light, sea and wind. I like the colours, the space and the ‘bodilyness’ of her work, but more than that, the ability to sidestep sentiment and self-indulgence by expressing powerful emotional experiences through her painterly creation of her settings.

Fiona Benson’s first full collection, which she is currently working on, should be something to look forward to.

Yesterday I went to Glasgow to hear Iain Anderson in conversation with Alan Riach and Norman Bissell about the poetry of Scotland.
This was a pretty good event even before it started because it gave me a chance to meet up with friends I met at the Atlantic Islands Festival on Luing last year, and there was some fantastic music by the Juniper trio, and poems by both speakers, but the conversation was also substantial, inspiring and thought-provoking.
It was nice to hear some very positive thoughts on the curriculum in Scottish schools – Scottish literature is alive and well and in safe hands if these educators are anything to go by, and there was a good deal of justified (in my opinion) optimism about the future generation of poets coming through. They drew attention to the riches of Scots and Gaelic available to writers in Scotland, and advocated that Gaelic should be in every primary school and nursery. Alan Riach made the sound suggestion that we should treat Gaelic as the New Zealanders treat Maori. Not everyone speaks it fluently, but everyone gets to experience the sounds and structures and concepts of the language as part of their personal and national identity.
Both speakers talked about the influence of place, landscape, communities, and language on poetry. They believe that the best art comes from the interaction between people and the world around them – “a heightened awareness of the things that are there that really matter, that you have to assent to” -such as landscape and weather, the facts of material life. This was given particular point by the fact that Alan Riach had recently broken an ankle falling on the ice, and he read a poem about it, referring to ‘the mercilessness we walk in’.They talked about Hugh Macdiarmid and Norman McCaig, Sorley Maclean and George Mackay Brown, but also musicians like Margaret Bennett, who was also taking part in Celtic Connections, and painters like William McTaggart Joan Eardley and William Gillies who shared this readiness to be regenerated and inspired by the geography.
It seems characteristic of Scottish culture that there should be this cross-fertilisation between disciplines. As they said at the end,”Closed compartments are only good for sinking ships. What we want is dialogue!”

O swan by swan my heart goes down
Through Dublin town, through Dublin town

from Liffeytown

I salvaged Eavan Boland’s New Collected Poems from the wreck of Borders just before Christmas and started to read it last night.
heart-stopping.
heart breaking.
I don’t know if I’m in love or in despair.
How could I ever write anything as good?

There’s a new link at the side to the site of a very promising young illustrator. She is a friend of Nomi at terragrith, who designed my web-site for me, and I first became aware of her work when she did a design for Eurydice Rising. Now she is working on a series of illustrations of the fairy-tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon , and as I’m working my way into the lesser-known girl-figures in fairy-tales and ballads, this is right on my target.
there’s some beautiful work there – go look!

The alchemy of myth-
the stars and angels, the earth’s
return to light, green ivy,
the quickening sap in the tree’s
deep heart, the cattle
kneeling in frosty fields,
the robin’s song at midnight –
all refined to the bare particular
fact of a birth –
that night, that inn, that boy.

Peace and happiness to everyone who is celebrating the winter feasts.

I was in Glasgow yesterday, and couldn’t resist going into Borders for the last time. I got two poetry books I’d wanted for ages for half price, and I guess Eavan Boland and Gillian Clarke will get the good of it no matter what the circumstances, but boy, it was sad.

The top floor was closed off altogether now so much stock has been sold, and all the rest is huddled onto shelves with temporary labels, and the gaps are appearing and closing up again as books go and are not replaced.

One of my children was working at the Sweater Shop when it went into administration, and although it wasn’t her career, just a student job, the experience was traumatic. As other shops closed down the leftovers were sent to hers, and people would rush in looking for bargains. Then the shelves would empty again and a few more staff would be let go. I got the same feeling yesterday. All the staff working their socks off, and knowing that every day brings you a little nearer the edge. God bless them, I hope they all find good jobs to got to, and soon.

But I also hope that whoever takes on the building will try to do something else significant with it. Borders was more than a bookshop. It was a bookshop that tried, as Waterstones used to, to present the range of what was available, to encourage diversity and experiment, to recognise that books were a bit more than a commodity, and reading was more than something to fill the time in airports. Not bad for a big corporate chain.

Last night Scottish Pamphlet Poetry organised a pamphlet fair, to which I was invited by Mary Thomson, who produces the most beautiful small books of illustrated poems – she doesn’t have a web-site, so I can’t post a link.

I was feeling fairly discouraged when I arrived. The night was wet and cold, the library appeared to be locked, and I’d just had the worst chicken Caesar salad I have ever seen in my life. However, there were signs helpfully directing us to a door that was open, and after that things looked up dramatically.

Inside there were tables where people were selling their pamphlets. It’s unbelievable how much good poetry you can get for a couple of quid, and some publishers – perhaps it would be unfair to single out Perjink Press, but they’re the ones I remember – go out of their way to make the pamphlets look and feel really lovely to handle and read. I didn’t buy nearly enough, and not half as much as the sellers would have liked, I bet, but I have more than exceeded my poetry budget this year (again) so it will have to do. Nobody any good is allowed to bring out a book until the start of the next financial year!

I met a great many friends, largely, but not confined to, people I knew from Callander. Poetry is such a solitary occupation that is is more than usually cheering to meet up with other poets, and it was nice to have it assumed I would have something to sell! There were readings, limited with ferocious military precision, to two minutes, which meant they could fit thirty-six readings into three hours (with intervals). And if you incurred the penalty, you got a bag of chocolate coins, which must have sweetened the blow more than somewhat.

In the intervals there was wine, (or orange juice)and home-made mince pies, and the bran tub, where for a pound I got AC Clark’s The Gallery on the Left, full of excellent poems about Vermeer and Cezanne. And music. I wish I could remember the names of the musicians because they played wonderful traditional music.

I had to leave early, because trains to Stirling run only once an hour after seven, and I had no idea how long it would take me to get to the station. But I left full of admiration not only for the poets, but for the organisation which could bring together so many talented people to put on such an event.