Wednesday 24 June 2009
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Welcome to the Ledbury Poetry Festival Blog
Are you coming to the Festival? Would you like to review an event? We would be glad to hear from you. Email me to let me know what event you are planning to review, then email the review to me after the event and I will post it here on the Ledbury Poetry Festival blog!
Read more about the Festival on the main Ledbury Poetry Festival website.
Read more about the Festival on the main Ledbury Poetry Festival website.
Ruth Padel on Darwin (Sat 4th July 2009)
ReplyDeleteBy Claire Buckland, July 2009
In this bicentenary year of Charles Darwin’s birth, it might be imagined that there is little new to glean from his story. Today, most children become familiar with his discoveries from an early age at school or are able to read up on his work in great detail on-line. Yet at this event Ruth Padel did manage to find something fresh to say about the man and, in so doing, reveal less widely known aspects of the naturalist’s life.
Padel, the great-great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, must have felt a great weight of responsibility in writing Darwin, A Life in Poems. It can have been no easy task finding a way to represent the life of such an influential individual, beyond that which has gone before. But her chosen mode of fusing actual journal entries and passages of personal letters with her own creative imaginings works well resulting in a chronology of Darwin’s life in verse.
For me, the salient message conveyed in this reading was how Darwin and his wife, Emma, managed to sustain their relationship in the face of differing beliefs. In the poem His Father Advises, Darwin’s father fears for the longevity of his son’s proposed marriage and tells him to ‘Conceal your religious doubts from any future wife. I have seen the misery they cause.’ This is a reference to how each of the two viewed death. For Darwin, death was a part of the cycle of life and evolution; for Emma, death was the lead-in to another level of existence and the salvation of the soul. When Emma was pregnant, she wrote him a note fearing that he might not be saved, if he did not believe in God. According to her beliefs, this meant that she would not see him again when she died. He kept this note all his life and left a message on it for her to find after his death. ‘When I am dead, know that I have kissed and cried over this many times.’
There was a lovely moment when Padel’s dog, feeling restless in the heat perhaps, came to join the poet on stage and remained at her side for the rest of the reading. The naturalist himself, she told us, was very accustomed to working with his four-legged friend at his feet. ‘Very Darwinian,’ Padel noted.
Women’s Work: Phillis Levin and Eva Salzman (Sat 4th July)
ReplyDeleteThere’s good poetry and there’s good poetry well read. The latter was definitely on offer in this double bill of American voices at the Ledbury Poetry Festival, aptly on American Independence Day.
Both poets read selected poems by other writers from the anthology entitled Women’s Work edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack. But, in my view, it was each writer’s own work which came alive most vividly in the reading. Of Phillis Levin’s poetry, two pieces in particular grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. Part explored the multiple meaning of the word (‘part’ being both noun and verb) emphasising the tendency in the English language to double up on words rather than create new ones. I was also drawn to the poem, May Day, a deeply layered piece which, like all good verse, could be interpreted on a number of different levels. Perhaps it was about remembrance, repetition, forgetting or all three. I’m still trying to decide which.
Some of Eva Salzman’s own work clearly evoked her American roots. I particularly enjoyed Brooklyn Bridge, a landmark very familiar to the poet, with its imagery of the construction being ‘a hunkering church’ or even a musical instrument: ‘That harp was made for me to play’. My favourite piece was Procrastinatin’ Blues, a kind of song to a certain unnamed someone who had kept Salzman waiting just once too often. From her punchy delivery of the poem, we felt that the verse must have emerged from an equally fiery discourse that took place under one of those huge railway station clocks, an hour after the designated time of meeting. We learnt something about punctuality in this poem: for Salzman, it’s personal.
As a regular visitor to the Festival, performance - for me - is a key component of my enjoyment of the work. I don’t think I realised quite how much that was true until I attended this event. When you read poetry by yourself, in that private moment, it is mainly about the words alone and whether you connect with them. At a public reading however, a degree of your relating to the poems comes with how they are served up to you. This can be a difficult thing to get right. A ‘small’ performance of good work can be as much of a turn-off as an overblown production. I think this event got the balance just right and I would recommend anyone going to hear either of these poets again, if they get the chance. A word of caution: if you buy tickets to see Eva Salzman, be sure to arrive at her performance on time.
by Claire Buckland
July 2009
Ledbury Poetry Festival
ReplyDeleteFrank Reeve, with Don Davis and Joe Deleault.
Review by John Rushby-Smith.
With his pair of expert musicians sometimes caterwauling, sometimes pussyfooting around him, the Blue Cat nudges open the cat flaps of the world. Sauntering in with that special confidence accorded him by his nine lives and concealed weaponry, he charms, cajoles and scolds his involuntary hosts; he rubs around the legs of human foibles and claws the furniture of the institutions of state; he sprays in the corner of complacency before slinking away to lead us a merry dance through the perils of a warzone. (Incidentally, if this cat never actually looked at a king, at least he looked directly into the eye of Nikita Khruschev.) Of the poems in his latest collection The Blue Cat Walks the Earth, “The Cat Remembers One of His Heroes” is surely Frank Reeve’s lament for his late son Christopher, cut down so famously in a riding accident (as the father of an accidental paraplegic myself I recognise the underlying anguish.) But his poetry is far more than a personal outpouring: it laments a topsy-turvy world, a world of iniquity and inequality, a world where “the young die before the old” on the battlefields of greed and ambition. It is a world where only the Blue Cat may roam in freedom.