Skating on Poetry Loch

One of the things I love about Shore Poets is that the format of our events often produces rich and varied evenings of music and poetry. October's reading with James W Wood, Christine De Luca and the wonderful, quietly intense Gillian Allnutt was no exception (the only problem being that Allnutt's quiet reading voice didn't carry well in the Mai Thai acoustic).

The reading this Sunday just gone was another case in point, with Rachael Boast, Nancy Somerville and David Kinloch, plus music from Ben Young. I'd met Rachael Boast before, but didn't know her work, so it was a pleasure to encounter such accomplished writing at Shore Poets in the newcomer slot.

David Kinloch's set consisted entirely of new poems, displaying all his typical richness and imaginative verve. He's working on a sequence of poems about Scottish painters, from which he read, closing with a poem that entertainingly imagines a painterly wager as the source of the recent controversy over whether Raeburn really did paint The Rev. Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch.

David is one of the driving forces behind the Glasgow Poetry Society, otherwise known as Vital Synz, which enjoyed a hugely successful launch early this month (I wasn't able to be there, unfortunately). There's an interesting programme of events coming up next year.

As well as organising the Vital Synz events, the society is running a new competition: the Edwin Morgan international poetry competition. Unlike most competitions, this one has a college of three judges--and an extremely varied one at that--in Colette Bryce, Donny O'Rourke and Richard Price. Given the diversity of poetics represented there, it looks like they're aiming to make it a stylistically broad competition, appropriately enough for a competition celebrating the protean Mr Morgan.