StAnza poetry festival, St Andrews review: 'a packed weekend'

StAnza International Poetry Festival, various venues, St Andrews ★★★★

In his opening remarks, artistic director Ryan Van Winkle described those assembled in St Andrews for this year’s StAnza poetry festival as “the best audience for poetry in the world”.

After a difficult few years, Van Winkle has steered StAnza back into calm waters, concentrating the programme over one packed weekend centred on the Byre Theatre.

Jackie Kay | Denise Else

Fittingly, for a festival which celebrates poetry in all its forms, the Opening Night event was in two halves, the first an experimental colour-themed performance featuring seven poets, and the second a reading by Ruth Padel, a superb poet and reader, with a dozen collections behind her. Her most recent, Girl, begins with the Virgin Mary and ends with Cretan snake goddesses, taking a journey in between through her own girlhood.

That’s a thing poetry can do well, weaving an idea across time, space and context. It can be sharp and pointed, like the excellent poems of Scots writer Nuala Watt, which challenge society’s gaze on her as a disabled woman and a mother, or it can be open and fluid, like the poems of Belgian writer Charlotte Van den Broeck, leaving space for the reader’s imagination.

Poetry can insist on hope in difficult times, according to former Scots makar Jackie Kay, joining Hannah Lavery for a superb Bards & Blether event of reading and conversation. Kay’s latest collection, May Day, is a warm tribute to her adoptive parents, and the theme of parents and parenting resonated through the whole festival.

Raymond Antrobus | Suki Dhanda

Gwyneth Lewis, the former national poet of Wales, shared a very different experience: an emotionally abusive mother. She read both from her memoir, Nightshade Mother, and from her latest poetry collection, First Rain in Paradise, which represents a “moving on”, a recovery of her own voice.

Her fellow headliner, Raymond Antrobus, making his StAnza debut, brought us many shades of fatherhood: a bittersweet relationship with his own father, and his own journey to becoming a dad.

His dynamic reading was a festival highlight, funny, poignant, and full of wonder at language, where it comes from, how we use it.

Jen Hadfield, taking part in the second Bards & Blether event on Sunday with Peter Mackay, spoke about the difficulty of finding space to write while caring for a 19-month-old baby. She read beautifully from her memoir Storm Pegs, a love letter to Shetland where she has lived for 18 years.

Caroline Bird, one the final readers this year along with the superb Imtiaz Dharker, shared several poems in which her three-year-old son was the imaginative collaborator. Bird is superb at taking an idea and running with it, in this case the “toddler perspective”, which can be surprisingly dark when pursued to its logical conclusion. Her reading was often funny and sometimes outrageous and left the audience calling for an encore.

StAnza’s theme this year, “How We Feel”, was barely remarked upon by any of the readers I heard, but perhaps that is simply what poetry does much of time, offers ways to express, explore and understand how we feel through - as Scottish-Algerian poet Janette Ayachi put it so elegantly - “the rapture and the rupture of life”.

That includes loss, and elegies surfaced through the weekend: Ayachi reading a poem for Gerry Loose, who died last year; Paul Farley remembering Michael Donaghy, and a workshop drawing inspiration from the work of John Burnside, erstwhile of St Andrews, and a StAnza veteran.

There is an element of elegy, or memorial, in Joelle Taylor’s TS Eliot Prize-winning collection C+nto and Othered Poems, a love letter to the underground lesbian scene in London in the 1980s and 1990s. However, giving the StAnza and Poetry Association of Scotland John Masefield Lecture with typical force and passion, she spoke of conjuring the ghosts of that community and making them live again at a time when their voices need to be heard.

Remembering can be a political act, and so can poetry, and there were plenty of moments over the weekend when poets bared their political teeth: in an excellent reading at the Wardlaw Museum in which writers responded to the exhibition Say No, which brings together contemporary art and feminist resistance; in the many reckonings with identity and colonial histories; and in an outdoor event devoted to Poetry and Protest.

It is a common misconception that poetry is difficult. What I heard, time and again, over the past weekend, is poetry which is accessible, moving, funny and rewarding, which has much to offer many. StAnza has found its stride again, and has a strong, supportive poetry audience who might even be “the best audience for poetry in the world”. Its challenge going forward is to expand that audience and draw in new readers to experience all that poetry can be.

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