Book review: Tfrust

I’ve heard poetry described as the cockroach of the arts,” said Tishani Doshi, reading at the StAnza Poetry Festival last Friday evening, “because it’s so difficult to squash it.”

TFRUST

AJAY CLOSE

Tippermuir Books, 355pp, £9.99

Certainly, people have tried: lack of funding, censorship, apathy. Yet nothing seems to crush people’s desire to express themselves in verse, and to listen to the verse of others.

The poetry lovers who come to StAnza in St Andrews every March know this well. They come for poetry in all its forms: performance poets at lunchtime; Border Crossings, which bring together poets from different backgrounds; readings from the major names in poetry – John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, or Paul Muldoon (pictured).

A Commonwealth theme ranthrough this year’s StAnza, and funding from Homecoming Scotland and others enabled it to host several poets from around the world. These distinctive voices remind us that each poet is forged by their own experience, while “home” is rarely a straightforward concept.

Tishani Doshi, for example, was born in Madras to an Indian father and Welsh mother. She spent her childhood in India with her summers in Wales, and studied in the US. She described herself in one of her poems as “an adulterous citizen”, making a home in one country while always thinking of another.

Her poetry has something of the wanderer about it, sometimes detached, sometimes yearning, observing the contemporary world and its superficiality, railing at impersonal group emails and the falsenes of Facebook friends. Her metaphor for poetic inspiration, however, is evocatively Indian: a mosquito buzzing in the ear which wakes the poet from slumber.

Another stand-out performance came from Botswana-born T J Dema. In her country, she says, poetry is just poetry, there is no distinction between verse for the page and verse for performance. Engaging, clever, opinionated, her poems were written to be read aloud. They are full of energy, determined to communicate (“Poems serve absolutely no purpose unless they reach someone”) while refusing to conform to the traits associated with “performance poetry”.

She shared Poetry Centre Stage on Saturday with Carol Ann Duffy, a consummate performer of her work. The poems from her collection, The World’s Wife, are not “performance poems” but they continue to be a delight to listen to. Next up was the StAnza Slam, a poetic stand-off in which 16 poets had two minutes each to make their impression on the audience and judges. The eventual winner, Agnes Torok, will take part in the Scottish Slam later this month.

Jamaican poet Tanya Shirley promised “a bit of sunshine” in her reading, and soon the colours and voices of her home country were warming the atmosphere in Parliament Hall. She ranged from playful, sensual poetry to poems which reflect the complexity of Jamaican society. She read with WN Herbert, walking the fine line between hilarity and existential angst which he does so well, and together gave one of the most entertaining readings of this year’s StAnza.

StAnza 2014 delivered on one of the festival’s widest-ranging, substantial programmes to date with many moments of pleasure, from the gently ironic verse of novelist Louis de Bernières to the cunning Scots humour of Rob A Mackenzie, taking a break from his Edinburgh pulpit to ponder questions of life, death, God and the soul through the eyes of a guinea pig.

Then there was Chinese language scholar Brian Holton, creating new versions of ancient Chinese poetry in vigorous Scots, Maggie Rabatski making her StAnza debut, with her lyrical poems about crofting life in Harris, current Scotland Slam champion Carly Brown on her home state of Texas and actress and playwright Gerda Stevenson presenting her first poetry collection.

Several years ago, StAnza introduced Round Table readings, a chance to engage with some of the festival’s biggest names in an intimate audience of just 12. It was a privilege to hear Jacob Polley reading largely from unpublished work, mining the past of Roman and Anglo-Saxon Britain for inspiration as an archaeologist might excavate layers of history in the earth.

And on Sunday afternoon, there was a rare opportunity to sit around a table with leading Irish poet Paul Muldoon while he talked about his own writing process, his role as poetry editor of the New Yorker, and the business of poetry itself. It’s a difficult business, he said, yet we keep doing it. Perhaps because the mosquito buzzing in the ear won’t be silent, the cockroach still refuses to die.