Les Murray / In Response Exhibition

17 Jun 2008 in Highland, Visual Arts & Crafts, Writing

Macphail Centre, Ullapool, 11 June 2008 / an talla solais, Ullapool, until 6 July 2008

Daniel Reeves: The Future. An Installation

THE NAIRN Book and Arts Festival has been offering some very rich pickings, but the literary event of the week for me-perhaps of the year-was actually a much quieter affair on the other side of the country, in Ullapool, where Les Murray was the guest of the team behind the developing visual arts centre, an talla solais.

Les Murray has been for many years now Australia’s most celebrated and renowned poet. But he also has strong links with the UK – as a younger man he lived here for over a year, even including six months in Culloden- and so he does undertake regular reading tours here. Given his fame, however, these are surprisingly low key affairs, often responding, as in the case of his Ullapool visit, to personal invitations, and driving himself the length and breadth of the country-no publishers’ entourage!

His reading in the MacPhail Centre was a similarly modest affair, with an audience of about 50. Asked if he found audiences different in different parts of the world, he said no, poetry people were much the same everywhere, and we were clearly ‘poetry people’.

After the high profile, carefully staged events in Nairn, Les Murray’s reading could have seemed almost offhand. Even with this small audience closely seated, it might have been better if he’d been miked, as he has a soft voice and can tend to swallow some words.

But then, that may be a ploy to encourage close listening. And his poems certainly repay that close attention. It’s perhaps not surprising that his work should attract a warm response in the Highlands, as it has a lot in common with writers like the late Norman MacCaig or Iain Crichton Smith: a wonderful eye for detail and fleeting moments, a generous humanity, a feel for the underlying sadness of life, a marvellous sense of place, and considerable, sometimes barbed, humour. And his exuberant love of words recalls another giant of that generation, happily still with us, Edwin Morgan.

Despite the informal manner, therefore, each poem he read was received by the audience like a precious gift. He has a particular talent for killer final lines-as he said, someone once complained that his poems don’t end, they just stop, and he confided that those magical final lines ‘have to be earned’ through the labour on the rest of the poem. Not surprisingly, there was a brisk trade in copies of his Collected Poems after the reading.

That evening also saw the launch of an exhibition ‘In Response’ at an talla solais. For some years now the group behind an talla solais have been mounting exhibitions in the building that used to house Ullapool’s library. They have now moved into the former medical centre next door, and this was the first exhibition to be presented in this new space.

All the artists featured had been invited to make work which responded to one of Les Murray’s poems. The result was particularly well suited to the kind of spaces this new an talla solais offers-a sequence of small rooms which allowed a concentration on the work of just one or two artists at a time.

Video artist Daniel Reeves complemented the poem ‘The Future’ with an installation that had at its heart a crystal ball that showed a sequence of strange and beautiful prophetic visions. Dalziel + Scullion presented three mesmerising sections of tree bark digitally photographed in the highest of High Definition.

Ullapool-based Eleanor White, who’d first issued the invitation to Les Murray, interpreted a poem about beans with a series of lush paintings that perfectly matched the wit and baroque language of the poem. Jacqueline Watt’s richly-overlaid abstract paintings related more to the texture of Murray’s poetry than to its content.

There seems to be an explosion of interest in literature in the Highlands these days, with book and writing festivals popping up all over the place. If this means that we can continue to attract writers of the calibre and standing of Les Murray, and those programmed in Nairn, then long may this trend continue!

© Robert Livingston, 2008

Links