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| The politics of land - where do poems take us? |
When I drove to Winchester on Friday the sun was bright and as I left the Downs landscape of Sussex behind, I felt my adolescence. Jamie asked where is this? Is it Hampshire?
Winchester was the start of my first holiday with Susan Wrigby, where I listened to an American boy sing Johnny Cash on a slope near the youth hostel and where I set off for the Isle of Wight. It was the year Hendrix played there, but I had to be home before the festival.
I grew up in Farnham, on a spur of Surrey jutting into Hampshire. And if I happen to pass through now, the county draws me back to itself with William Cobbett's words, the sounds of a folk club and walks among cowslips and brambles. I have always felt that link with Cobbett, himself born in Farnham, whose Rural Rides was on our bookshelf.
In the Saturday morning session that was linked to a debate about climate change, the Suffolk based poet Rebecca Goss began her poems based on country jobs and I remembered an old bloke who lived down the road and set traps for foxes, the farmer who could trace his family back centuries, the blacksmith and the kennel owners - people from the county I grew up in, Surrey. Goss is well known for her searing collection, Her Birth (Carcanet) and told her audience she was still looking for the 'darker' side of Suffolk. She reminded us of the power of those early poems with 'Sarah' a stunning poem about female friendship. I never heard a nightingale there but Harry Mann's been chasing endangered species around the UK. Appropriate then, perhaps that his first poem was about the neurology of a nightingale. He is modern and experimental. It was right, too, that he left us in stitches at the end with a crazy sestina called Arnie’s Poetic, in the language of Hollywood.
Jamie was reading in the evening, so was present mostly as a contributor to a discussion on nature writing. Happy to be controversial, Jamie suggested it had stopped with Ted Hughes and has only recently re-invented itself. At this point I remembered the always challenging Peter Reading at another festival years ago in Kings Lynn where he laid into what he described as Hughes’ anthropomorphism of the animals he wrote about. And I wondered if this monolithic male, whose work, don’t get me wrong, I admire and read with pleasure, really was a dam or was it a distraction from many other, lesser known poets?
I thought about Michael Longley and Gillian Clarke, for example, who write lyrically about the natural world. And I began listing in my head some of the others, including Pauline Stainer, Lee Harwood, legions of poets in fact, who are not national institutions. But like nature itself, poetry is various and the non famous, less read poets, like invisible insects, beetles and moths, belong to poetry's eco-systems and within these, to keep the metaphor going, there is an astonishing diversity. Let diversity be at the heart of our debates - there are many poets and many ideas...Winchester Poetry Festival appears to be conscious of diversity in all its meanings and that is refreshing.
There are mistakes, often, in life that allow for the beautifully unexpected and in another Saturday morning session, the rule of three (the three poet reading) was broken when JO Morgan's car broke down. So for Let Light Be Enough, Cork poet Doireann Ni Ghriofa and Pascale Petit became perfectly balanced scales - Petit majestic and still, Ni Ghriofa deftly playing the music of her contemporary/historic mix.
It was a world first for the festival - the first time Ni Ghriofa has performed in England, even visited, in fact, and therefore the first time she'd read from her second English collection, Lies (Dedalus Press). The pile of her books on the bookseller's stall was gone as soon as the session finished. I saw a woman whip the last copy away from another as the second hesitated. Ni Ghriofa read in English and Irish and she is a compelling, charismatic young woman. A volunteer afterwards was saying she could read a shopping list, her delivery is so musical. Something of her reminded me a little of Kim Addonizio, in the way she struck out the beat of one poem with her boot. And while her poetry is strikingly lyrical, it is also utterly modern; tied into Irish history, it speaks to a generation brought up on cracked phone screens and interrupted Skype connections.
Petit's work is difficult, emotionally, but her stillness on stage contains its enormous implications and gives her phenomenal presence. Mama Amazonica, the collection she read from, won Petit a heft £10,000 Ondaatje Prize this summer - the first poetry to bag this prestigious award. Her material both goes to the core of being human as well as mental illness. Mama Amazonica conflates the sickness of a mother with the sickness imposed on the earth’s lungs, the rainforest and Petit’s images are astonishing - drawn from science, observation and myth they seem to hold modern life and release insights from where psyche meets science. And at Winchester, Petit gave the audience a taste of her next collection drawing on the landscape of Rajasthan, the birthplace of her grandmother whose Indian heritage was kept a family secret.
Continuing the world journey, the afternoon led into evening with poetry in translation from Iranian born Azita Ghahreman, Syrian Kurdish poet Golan Haji and Nicola Madzirov from Macedonia. Award winning poet Maura Dooley read English translations of Ghahreman’s work and Stephen Watts read translations of Haji’s. Madzirov has read in the UK several times and his work is now being translated by Carolyn Forche. His quiet stillness and the space around his words gives him the presence of a monk. He reminds us of peripheral spaces and the traces we leave. Ghahreman’s poems are forcefully visual and in Persian, the sounds are round and rich. Her collection Negative of a Group Photograph covers 30 years of poems, many written about leaving Iran for Sweden. “My tongue trips up when I speak of that journey,’ she writes and ‘my name here is neither immigrant nor exile.’
With Golan Haji’s poems drawing on the Odysseus story, this festival afternoon draws attention to the profound importance of translation in opening up the world, its ability to alter perceptions. And there is a need for that opening up as politicians become increasingly unreliable narrators and interpreters of contemporary life.
So onto Saturday evening and a trio of distinctive voices to end the second festival day, introduced by one of the creative directors, Sasha Dugdale, as compelling, generous and spiritually expansive: Vahni Capildeo, Ishion Hutchinson and Kathleen Jamie - each of them political, each of them fiercely rooted in places marked by conflict. Capildeo barely pauses for breath as her experimental, imagistic words pour out, as if all that has been suppressed must now be expressed. Hutchinson’s poems, like those of Derek Walcott before him, are steeped in history, play with the vernacular and language of the pulpit, are defined by the detail of the Caribbean and the symbolism of that detail. Jamie reshapes the reading space as a storyteller, refusing to translate from Scots, her sometimes awkward introductions a marked contrast to fluid and marvellous poems - where, like the basking shark she introduced us to in the Shetlands, she seems most at ease.
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