Against the Football

Shore Poets on Sunday went head to head with the Euro 2008 finals. That, coupled with the start of the holidays, might well have had something to do with the somewhat reduced numbers. I have to say, it was a cracker of an evening.

The new poet, Simon Pomery, was one of the best we've had for a while. He wasn't the most relaxed in his introductions but, once he got into the poems themselves, he read well. And there were some really strong poems in his set. There's some of his work here. He read "Jeremiah" and several poems from his "Divina Lux" series, but not the ones you can view online. Simon has a pamphlet coming out with Tall Lighthouse in the autumn, if I remember rightly; worth looking out for.

Roddy Lumsden is behind the Tall Lighthouse pamphlets, which provides a link between Simon and the Shore poet for the evening: Angela McSeveney, with whom Roddy overlapped at Edinburgh University. Angela read with her usual skill and aplomb from Slaughtering Beetroot, her fine new Mariscat pamphlet. She's currently poet of the month on the Scottish Poetry Library website.

Richard Price, the main reader, read from his first two books as well as new work. Richard is a fabulous, mesmerising reader. His work is always fascinating, stimulating and strangely beautiful. You can hear him on PoetCasting and the Archive of the Now and I recommend you take a listen. Better still, buy Lucky Day, Greenfields and/or some of his pamphlets.

Interestingly, Richard has been writing a lot of rhyming poetry recently. Although this takes him away from the spare modernism of earlier work to a certain extent, a Richard Price poem in ballad form is still unlike anything else you'll read or hear. Nonetheless, there's an extremely strong song element to these poems, so it's no surprise he's been writing song lyrics too. In fact, her read one song; you'd be hard pushed to distinguish it formally or stylistically from some of the recent poems. And I mean that as a compliment.

That gives us a kind of link to Sunday's music. Stewart Hanratty was excellent, with powerful, jazz-tinged songwriting and guitar playing. After his song about hats, it was inevitable that Angela should read her poem on the same subject. You'll just have to buy the pamphlet to read it, though!

Sunday's event was my last as a Shore poet. I've stepped down from the group after, I think six years, owing partly to a busier family life. It has been great fun to be part of Shore Poets, but it's time to concentrate my energies elsewhere. I still plan to be around the readings, so this won't be the last SP gig report you'll read here. I went out on a high, though: I won the famous Shore Poets lemon cake.

A Beetrooty Launch and a Groggy Reading

A week past Tuesday, I went to the launch of Angela McSeveney's new Mariscat pamphlet Slaughtering Beetroot at the Scottish Poetry Library. I can safely say it's the only launch I've been to where beetroot cake was on offer. Angela had baked it herself, and it was, you may say, delicious. And the poetry was at least as good. I think this could be Angela's best collection yet. Her characteristic "clear-water shine" (Iain Crichton Smith) is, of course, in evidence, but it grows ever stronger mixed with a certain wry determination and a sense that she is perhaps more relaxed in herself and her writing than in previous work. Well worth parting with £5.00 for it.

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Last Sunday was the final Poetry at the Great Grog before the summer break. Jim Carruth was the first reader. His is a distinctive voice, bringing the farming experience to us urban dwellers in unsentimental, inventive poems. No hint of the romanticising of the rural life here, although there is plenty of anger and regret, often below the surface. His love poem to silage (I kid you not) was a tour-de-force of rhyme. I'd quite like to get a hold of it and subject it to my usual "Reasoning Rhyme"-type analysis.

My memory of the order has gone a bit hazy at a week's remove, but I'm reasonably certain it was Mike Stocks next, before Eleanor Livingstone. Mike read very well from his collection of sonnets, Folly. However, I have to say, although there were some fine examples of what you can achieve within those confines, it left me feeling you can have too much of a good form, as do Alan Spence's all-haiku readings. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy such readings at all. Mike can write powerful* and funny sonnets, but sometimes I wanted him to make the form disappear.

Eleanor read well, mostly from new work, including memorable poems about her Fife childhood escapades and her daughter's reading habits.

Kapka Kassabova was the final reader. Kapka is from Bulgaria, via New Zealand, and writes about the experience of exile in a way that communicates strongly to us non-exiles. I say "us non-exiles", but there were other exiles in attendance and, besides, there's something in the Scottish psyche that could almost be described as exiled from itself or from its own history and culture. To me, Kapka's work speaks to that aspect of Scottishness, perhaps not directly, but powerfully.

I also met Julia Rampen, who will be reading at the Great Grog at some point next year. Julia was one of the Foyle Young Poets winners in 2005 and 2006, as well as a runner-up in the Tower Poetry competition in 2006 and one of the winners in The Rialto's fifth young poets competition. To judge by the poems I've linked to, she's obviously talented; I'm looking forward to hearing her read.

Poetry at the Great Grog will be back in September with Michael Schmidt, Helena Nelson, Dorothy Baird and another Foyle Young Poet, Charlotte Runcie.

*Perhaps none more so than the one here, which nearly made me cry when I read it. It wasn't in his set.

Blues that Stays News

I can't help but think that last night's Shore Poets event could have shown some of Thursday night's slammers a thing or two about how imaginative and contentful something that might be described as a performance poem can be. Nowhere was that more the case than in the closing set, from the night's main reader, WN Herbert.

Bill Herbert would be a hard man to beat in a slam. He has always been a poet of many guises, a writer with a flair and versatility few can match. Ballads, sonnets or blues; rhymed or unrhymed poetry; metred or free verse; lyric or narrative; surreal or realist; tender, witty, erudite or scatalogical--this man can do it all with equal aplomb and intelligence. And he does it in Scots, English and all the fluid gradations between the two sibling languages.

Bill's set last night leant heavily towards the more performancy end of his writing, especially with his early poem "Talking Water Blues" and the title poem from his most recent collection, "Bad Shaman Blues". Both push the blues into unexpected places. Don't think of Auden's use of the form. Or, if you do, think of it crossed with MacDiarmid and dropping acid like chocolate buttons. "Cognitive freefall" is how I once heard him describe his writing technique. That's maybe not a bad description of the imaginative riot at the heart of the work, but it belies the degree of effortless craft in the poems.

June's Shore poet was Angela McSeveney. Angela is a much less showy writer than Bill Herbert, but her performance was no less assured or sparky than his. She delivered the night's most memorable piece--a vivid, hugely entertaining poem about slaughtering beetroot, which she dedicated to Hamish Whyte who had just celebrated a significant birthday. Her set was packed with gems of her clear, honed, crystalline writing.

The opener this month was Dorothy Baird, whose new collection is just coming out with Two Ravens Press. A good, assured set. I particularly liked "The Cry of the Night Child" and the poem of hers built on the conceit that dawn is the only word for the dawn in English. She spoilt the conceit slightly by saying "dawn is the only word for the sunrise in English", but the poem was good nonetheless.

The music was from three lassies from the Edinburgh Youth Gaitherin, a traditional music project. Ailsa, Becky and Mairi (I didn't get their surnames) must be in their early 20s at most but are already accomplished traditional singers and treated us to three excellent sets of Scots, English and Irish songs.

Usually, the Shore Poets season finishes in June. However, this year, we have a special event in July for our Orkney exchange. The shame is that, although I'm going to Orkney on the exchange in October, I won't make it to next month's reading because I'll be heading off to this Arvon course. Normal Shore Poets service resumes in September, when Polly Clark will be the headliner.