StAnza festival plunders the myth kitty to great effect

YOU don't expect to hear Homer read aloud in the original at 10 o'clock in the morning at a poetry festival. Nevertheless, Stephen Halliwell, a Greek scholar from St Andrews University, treated us to the strange, abrasive sound of Ancient Greek to open a breakfast discussion on Myth and Legend, one of the central themes of this year's StAnza Poetry Festival.

He accompanied his reading with a timely reminder that reworking myths is far from a modern phenomenon – the Greeks re-imagined and subverted every bit as much as poets do today.

The "myth kitty" is clearly a rich and valuable resource for writers, from Tiffany Atkinson transporting the forms of Catullus to a contemporary Welsh seaside town, to Moniza Alvi finding a way to write about rape through the myth of Europa. And that myth kitty has itself become enriched down the years by other legends. For Tom Pow, the Celtic myth of the Selkie facilitates a moving account of the nature of marriage; and Glasgow-Jamaican poet Kai Miller is in the act of creating myth when he writes of the "singer man", hired to sing labourers to work in the road-building crews of the Caribbean.

In a lively discussion about the uses and misuses of myth, it took Arizona poet Rebecca Seiferle to question the extent which ancient myths are still common currency among readers as well as writers, adding that it sometimes as feels as though she has to "bring a myth back from the dead in order to drive a stake through it heart".

StAnza has been part of the literary landscape of Scotland for 12 years, and with that coming of age has come a confidence to ask tough questions about the relevance and importance of poetry in the contemporary world. In the past few days it has both asked these questions and answered them, with a series of world-class readings from all along the breadth of the poetic spectrum.

This year, StAnza was buzzing: students offering free recitations to anyone who would listen in the Byre Theatre bar; a one-man Fringe collecting donated poems on a bench outside; rumours rife of a black market in Seamus Heaney tickets; conversations on the street about translating Douglas Dunn into Galician.

In his lecture Myth, Magic and the Future of Poetry, writer and poet Grevel Lindop made a persuasive case for the linking of poetry and the supernatural using the myths of Wales, Ireland and Scandinavia, while arguing for the importance of poetry as a vehicle for restoring magic in a world that often seems intent on obliterating any sense of the sacred.

The medieval Welsh Triads, Lindop said, summed up succinctly the three resources a bard requires: myth, poetic power and a store of ancient verse. All three were resplendent in a rare extended reading by Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney on Thursday evening.

Reading much new work from his forthcoming collection, Human Chain, to be published in September, he drew richly on myth (Virgil, Mad Sweeney, the New Testament) and on writers gone before (from John Donne to Dante). And there was no doubting the poetic power of his performance.

But to these, I would add a fourth quality. One might call it honesty or intimacy, a powerful sense of the personal, putting well-loved poems such as Mid-Term Break, about the death of his younger brother in a road accident, alongside new poems written for his parents, and for his wife and friends after the minor stroke he had in 2006.

The warmth and generous spirit of the man himself – undertaking long book-signings after each sell-out event – was echoed back in the warmth with which he was received (when he admitted to a scratchy throat, half of St Andrews wanted to offer him cough sweets). These days, Heaney turns down many requests for festival appearances. In St Andrews he found an audience he described (quoting Yeats) as "hearers and hearteners of the work".

Another of the ways in which poetry restores magic to the world is in the transformation of the everyday. Lindop's own poetry – read as part of the Director's Cut strand of the programme, chosen by retiring director Brian Johnstone – amply proved this, tracing how an ordinary piece of furniture, such as a bed, can encapsulate the story of a life.

Jean Sprackland, with whom he read, found magic in a delayed train and a dried fish; Colette Bryce in a trip to the carwash and a walk through the streets of Dundee; Canadian poet Karen Solie in the wonders of a new tractor on the plains of her native South-west Saskatchewan.

But the master of this was Irishman Dennis O'Driscoll, whom one writer described as "a recording angel of life's sacred banalities". His poems about Friday-evening pizzas and after-work supermarket trips might seem mundane, particularly couched in his funny, self-effacing delivery, but they have a resonance which extends far beyond their length.

Which brings us to another of the magical qualities of poetry: subtlety, the ability to deal aslant with subjects too difficult or painful to confront. Heaney used the image of Aeneas in the underworld trying to embrace his father's shade to evoke his own father, a stolid Ulster farmer not given to displays of affection; Anne-Marie Fyfe read a moving poem about a train journey taken with her terminally ill mother, which enabled her to imagine her mother's youth for the first time.

And then there is a quality which is the opposite of subtlety: a poetry which demands attention. Ben Okri delivered a powerful manifesto for the importance of poetry in the modern world, and the fast-paced performance poetry of Canadian John Akpata (who has run for federal election three times in Ottawa on a ticket of anti-corruption and legalising marijuana) slipped easily from the personal into the political.

Alvi read from a work in progress about the events surrounding the partition of India. And Linton Kwesi Johnson, regarded as the founder of dub poetry, gave a reading which was both a sobering history lesson and a powerful argument for poetry as a vehicle through which to address issues and perceptions of race.