‘Can poetry save the world? It saves the world every day’
0 John Burnside demonstrated how a poem written 50 years ago can address today’s problems with uncanny precision
live across and between borders: George Mario Angel Quintero from California and Colombia via the New York of the Beat poets; Matthew Stewart, an English writer who has made his home in Spain but lives with the emigrant experience of not feeling entirely at home in either place.
International Women’s Day fell in the middle of the festival, and the strength and diversity of women’s voices was one of this year’s strongest features. Scotland’s Gerda Stevenson, read from Quines, her celebration of little known Scottish heroines stretching back 5,000 years. Jacqueline Saphra, one of the highlights of the festival, cast a knowing eye over the behaviour of men towards women, whether that of her own father or the male bastions of the literary canon. She also read from A Bargain with the Light, her powerful sonnet sequence inspired by theworkofmodelandphotographer Lee Miller.
The work of AE (Alicia) Stallings, an American writer living in Athens, was a revelation to many at Stanza. A classicist steeped in the writing of the ancients, she brings something of their wit and wisdom to her own observations of contemporary life. Her most recent work revisits Hesiod, one of the earliest writers in western literature, finding concerns which are timely in our own world: debt, hunger, work, right relations with your neighbour and the land.
Family, both celebrating it and exploring its challenges, was a reccurring theme. Saphra wrote powerfully
about her parents, and both Mary Jean Chan and Scotland’s Diana Hendry returned more than once to the subject of their mothers. Black Country poet Liz Berry evoked the spectrum of emotions associated with becoming a mother herself in a superb reading, which included her poem The Republic of Motherhood, the winner of the Forward Prize for best single poem in 2018.
Stanza continues its valuable job of recovering lost voices from the past, this year including the work of Scottish poet and playwright Jean Ure, recently republished thanks to poet Richie Mccaffrey, and Scots-jewish poet AC Jacobs, whose life lived on the margins has much to say to today’s society. Scottish poet Tom Pow paid tribute to the translation work of the late Alastair Reid, concluding his talk with a recording of Reid himself, a spine-tingling moment which brought a voice from the past – almost literally – back to life.
One of the reasons people love poetry is that they find in a poem something which resonates with their own experience, whether that is in Ferlenghetti writing in the 1980s about the erosion of freedom or Alan Spence, who can pinpoint in the few haiku syllables a moment which is both unique and entirely recognisable. Can poetry save the world? Burnside answered his own question – and Stanza went on to repeat that answer again and again over the course of its five days. “Don’t be silly. Of course it does. It saves the world every day.”
SUSAN MANSFIELD