St Magnus Centre, Kirkwall, 11 February 2006

Jen Hadfield.

POETRY, PROSE, SONG, wine and the company of friends – there can’t be many better ways of spending an evening of winter darkness (though fleets of green masts are appearing on the grass verges).

This reading was the culmination of day one of the first ever Northern Isles Writing Weekend organised by OIC’s Arts Development Officer Clare Gee, with Alex Cluness, Shetland Arts Trust’s Writing Development Officer, and Alistair Peebles, Chair and Literature Representative of Orkney Arts Forum.

Billy Jolly launched the evening with a 19th century version of ‘The Greenland Whale Fishing’, drawing the audience with him in the wake of the refrain. The ballad recounts how the ship’s captain turns for home from barren darkness of the north lamenting the loss of four brave men when their boat capsizes, flicked over by a flash of the whale’s tail.

South now to Shetland we were carried by poet Alex Cluness, from the wastes of the ocean into the wastes of the heart; into the thoughts of a selection of the characters who appear in his pamphlet, Disguise.

These included, variously and amazingly, a porn star and a teacher and, poignantly, a fisherman hoping the girl he has left behind will be safe as “the North Sea Squeezed the concertina of the fragile red boat” and “the ocean formed a landslide and at a wild angle the call came to haul the nets”.

Alex finished by reading a selection of poems from a pamphlet in progress, bleakly named Dead Numbers. Characterised by dark and bitter wit, these poems formed a chilling roll call of men condemned by the death penalty.

---

Retired doctor Diana Clay from Sanday remarked that “culture astonishment” was closer to her experience as an incomer than “culture clash”

---

Alison Miller grew up in Orkney and now lives in Glasgow; her first novel, Demo, was published to critical acclaim last November. In the first section she read on Saturday she took us further south again, to Florence and the eve of the demonstration against the war in Iraq.

Glasgow teenager Clare goes to a restaurant with her brother Danny and his two friends, the patronising Julian and the (memorably titless) Laetitia, who loves Jane Austen. Faced with these two she feels ignorant and gauche but as the meal continues she has (satisfyingly) the realisation that she knows more than she thought she did – and that Julian perhaps knows less than he thought he did.

More striking still than the keenly observed and witty details of this dinner was the description from later in the novel of the demo Clare attends in Glasgow with her friend Farkhanda carrying a placard in Urdu. With description of the banners of the many organisations represented on the march flowing in waves up the hill, and the snatches of protest songs with which Alison punctuated her reading, this was evocative stuff, calling up the hope and high ideals of such days.

Following the interval there was a reading by participants in the workshops run earlier in the day by Alison Miller and Jen Hadfield. Retired doctor Diana Clay from Sanday remarked that “culture astonishment” was closer to her experience as an incomer than “culture clash”, implying a more fruitful, creative experience than that conveyed by the latter expression.

In her poem, “Northern Seaboard”, she conveyed the visitor’s clear eyed impression of a pod of pilot whales in the water, “severed heads, small eyes in smart black skin”, as well as the practical perspective of the Greenlander – “you can drive them up the beach . . .very good meat” – and the startling juxtaposition of traditions of both past and present in the fisherman who “wanted to be a viking in his shiny red hatchback.”

Librarian Becky Ford’s poem was akin to a riddle, its repetitions chiming pleasingly and intriguingly; artist Sylvia Hay’s monologue took us vividly into the fascinatingly “other” life of a cat out on its secret night time exploration; Kay Buckner, visiting from Berlin, used repetition powerfully in her poem to build the sense of entrapment in darkness (depression?) and moved steadily on to convey, with a sense of illuminating and culminating truth, the imperative to get out.

Orkney writer Morag McGill contibuted three poems, a witty view of the Old Man of Hoy “trapped – caught by one leg”; a reflection on the demise of the “heroic” days of lighthouse keepers: “Nooadays there’s no electrics – no big man loupin the stairs”; and finally, a moving poem in which the predicament of Isabel Gunn who worked as a man with the Hudson Bay Company until, with the birth of her child, her secret was, literally, out.

The evening culminated in a reading from Jen Hadfield, poet and 2003 winner of an Eric Gregory Award which gave her the time to travel and write in Canada. Her powerful first collection, Almanacs, was published by Bloodaxe last year.

It was, however, new poems she read: poems which were at times light hearted and playful, as in “Paternoster”, a horse’s version of The Lord’s Prayer (“hallowed be thy hot mash”); and at others starred with her characteristically vivid imagery – “sled dogs jump like strangled angels towards heaven” and a polar bear lies with “muppet mouth agape” and paws, “flat unripe strawberries of the snow”.

Most memorable of all though, was the poem inspired by the ballad of “Tam Lin” – her reading and her singing searing, heart rending – which lingered as we headed out into the dark, homewards.

© Yvonne Gray, 2006