Relaxed retrospective by a delightful double act
“I’D love to go for a meal with these two,” one audience member told her friend. “I think it would be really entertaining.” As indeed it would. Ali Smith
and Jackie Kay had just wrapped up an hour’s retrospective about Margaret Tait, the Orkney-born film-maker and poet, who died in 1999. They screened a couple of Tait’s short films, read some of her poetry, and discussed her life and times.
They did so in the relaxed, humorous, knowledgeable way of two old friends who know Tait’s work well. Kay, for her part, said she detected the voices of Lorca, Lawrence and MacDiarmid in the poetry.
Tait made many short films, or film poems, and, in 1992, the feature length Blue Black Permanent.
The two short films shown were A Portrait of Ga, and a revealing, affectionate film about MacDiarmid: we see him writing at home, and walking along kerbstones and a wall, and we hear him reading some of his poems.
Sixty years ago, the enterprising Tait even staged her own film festival in her Rose Street premises, some 200 yards from the book festival site, with a “small and very appreciative audience” watching some international experimental shorts as well as some of Tait’s own work.
Later, John Carey, noted commentator, Emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford, and lead book reviewer for a Sunday newspaper, was interviewed by Steven Gale.
He recalled his childhood in Barnes, London, where his family endured the Blitz. Once, an incendiary bomb landed in the garden and its fierce phosphorescent light turned night into day.
On Saturday Carey was courteous and engaging. He crisply scorned academic literary critics, spoke of the demands that come with chairing book prize judging panels, and voiced his lasting admiration for the fourvolume collection of George Orwell’s essays, letters and journalism.
In the course of his estimated 1,000 book reviews Carey has wounded some authors’ feelings, to the point where there was once an anti-Carey club. Author Ben Macintyre’s mother, who lived close to the professor’s home, mischievously suggested that a pair of frilly knickers be somehow inserted into the Carey family laundry for his wife to find.
Carey’s second and final book extract reminded us why we should, after all, read. Reading “releases you from the limits of yourself,” he said. “Reading is freedom.”
These words alone were enough to propel you in the direction of the bookshop across the green. It was a minor cause of regret that time was not found for him to discuss his encounters with such notables as Larkin and Auden.
Just over a decade ago, in June 2004, the BBC’s security correspondent, Frank Gardner, was left for dead after being shot repeatedly by al Qaeda militants in Riyadh. Gardner survived, but his cameraman, Simon Cumbers, was killed.
On Saturday evening the queue to see Gardner covered almost all of the four sides of the green at Charlotte Square Gardens.
Gardner told Ruth Wishart about his return to Saudi Arabia last year, and screened a montage of his Middle East photographs as evidence of his belief that the region, whatever its other problems, is also a place of peace, beauty and kindness. He discussed Saudi Arabia’s security situation, the emancipation (or slow pace thereof) of its women, and the reasons why it has avoided an Arab Spring uprising.
Right at the end, he quietly pointed out that all the questions from the audience had come from men, prompting Wishart to select a woman.
“It’s a BBC thing,” he deadpanned.
Yesterday, in the Guardian Spiegeltent, the brilliant Scottish-born poet Robin Robertson read from poems old and new, indulged his passion for Dionysus, “the most disruptive and enigmatic God in the Greek pantheon,” and, partnered by Karin Altenberg, read from his vivid new translation of Bacchae, by Euripides.
There was also a succession of poems relating to heart surgery Robertson has undergone, culminating in A&E, from his widely praised, most recent, collection, Hill of Doors.
The description “gateway to hell”, meanwhile, applied not to Dundee, as one might think, he quipped, but to the whirlpool of Corryvreckan, the subject of another of his new poems.
He closed with a salute to his hometown, Aberdeen. In all, this was a performance you wished could have lasted longer than its allotted hour.
In the ScottishPower Foundation Studio, the great, accolade-laden poet Paul Muldoon was interviewed by Robyn Marsack, director of the Scottish Poetry Library.
Over an hour he observed that most poets do not have a reputation in their own lifetime, citing the example of John Donne; admitted he had not made any money from his 1986 Faber anthology of Irish verse, such was the cost of the permissions involved.
Touched on the playfulness in his poetry and spoke about poets Louis MacNeice and Seamus Heaney, and the late rock singer, Warren Zevon.
He also read three of his works: A Dent, Firing Squad, and Comeback, from The Word on the Street.