Durham Literature Festival and Colpitts Poets presents
Medbh McGuckian and Micheal O'Siadhail
Saturday 18 October
As the stragglers arrived, extra chairs were hurriedly put out and the event's start was signalled by a concertina, as Jim O'Boyle played The Coolin. Watched by a plethora of poets, Patty O'Boyle introduced the two visitors from Ireland, each with their own distinctive voice and style.
Medbh McGuckian began by thanking Durham City Arts, for taking care of her material needs - it seems some hosts regard poets as being so ethereal that this is not necessary!
A recurring theme in the work she presented was the death of her father, as in Black Virgin, which begins:
Sea-black virgin - being in love with you
is a fine space. I will never live
in your searching wash, your grass wallpaper,
your bewildered red gardens.
You desire your wholeness, your virginity,
to be admired by angels only.
Such dry self-knowledge. Such sheer
Englishness - how could I
have mistaken you for my father?
This also touches on another theme, that of national identity, always a complex issue for people from the north of Ireland. As she elaborated in an aside "When we're [in Ireland] we resent being English, when we're here we feel at home."
Medbh McGuckian's poems present a series of images and some reviewers have called them obscure; Fred Johnston, remarked in his review of Venus and the Rain: 'I do believe - though it may be sensibly argued that we don't always have to know what a poem means to enjoy it - that it quite often rambles, in love with its own sound, like someone overheard out for a walk humming a tune whose sense one can only guess at as one passes by. Pleasing to the hummer, surely; to the listener unfathomable.'
Micheal O'Siadhail opened he evening with a varied selection from his work; he closed the evening with a second set taken almost exclusively from a single book, The Gossamer Wall, to which he has devoted the past four years of his life.
The poems of The Gossamer Wall all centre on the theme of the Holocaust. Micheal O'Siadhail was moved to write about the Holocaust, he explained, because it had been the pivotal point of the twentieth century. Now, sixty years on, the last survivors were dying of old age and could no longer tell their stories themselves. As the chance of hearing at first hand the voices of survivors passed into history, he wanted to make their testimonies into poetry as a promise to remember, a promise of "Never again".
The darkness of this subject matter was, if anything, made more intense by being conveyed in the formal rhymes and metre of Micheal O'Siadhail's poetry. But he took pity on the audience, and ended the reading on a note of hope, with a love poem. And that note was reflected in Jim O'Boyle's choice of a tune Kitty's Wedding with which his concertina brought the evening to a close.
