Books: StAnza Poetry Festival

ATTENTIVENESS to words – the kind of deep listening in which the tightness of the lines releases looser fusillades of memory, thought and feeling – is a rare thing. Poets dream of it. In the last reading of this year's StAnza poetry festival, Don Paterson recalled a dream in which his audience seemed to laugh at every last drop of wit and sigh appreciatively at every last pinned-down nuance of feeling. "And then the lights went up. And they were Orcs."

Yet the audience at StAnza is, as Seamus Heaney pointed out in an interview with The Scotsman, a "deep poetry audience". Look there for attentiveness, and you'd find it: in, for example, the rapt attention given to Mario Petrucci's poetry about fusions of love and death at Chernobyl, or for Jen Hadfield's poetry, so clearly written from within her northern landscapes. But while Petrucci is an assured, confident performer of his work, Hadfield's delivery can still be too quiet: her Daed-traa, about the hiatus between the turn of the tides, and her prose-poem The Wren are both works of wonder, but only those of us in the first few rows might have been able to realise it.

Elsewhere, the audience's attentiveness was matched by that of the performers – most obviously in the improvisations Richard Ingham and Louise Major of Trio Verso wove around retiring festival director Brian Johnstone's poetry.

Earlier on, the subtlety of their freeform music was mirrored by the stagecraft of Linda Marlowe's one-woman show based on Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife sequence of poems. In both cases, the words expanded by artistry were already expansive enough – Marlowe, for example, ranged convincingly from Myra Hindley to Midas's wife, from the Kray sisters to a female King Kong.

The flamboyant feminist revenge of Duffy's poetry had fainter echoes in Vicki Feaver's reading, which mainly drew on her last collection, The Book of Blood. But although her best poems have a mythic element, the purely domestic ones sometimes fail to convince, relying perhaps excessively on the shock value of their imagery.

In Paterson, however, StAnza had just the right poet to round off a successful festival. Those people who dole out poetry prizes aren't wrong: the work he is doing now has the confidence, intellectual coherence, and intimacy of truly great poetry. He read superbly, in front of the kind of attentive, appreciative audience he might occasionally dream of – without an Orc in sight among them.