Review by Jenny McBain
Angus Peter Campbell
25 Mar 2010 in Highland, Writing
Village Hall, Ullapool, 20 March 2010
Angus Peter Campbell (photo - Scottish Book Trust)
THIS EVENT served to launch the upcoming Ullapool Book Festival, but there was purpose beyond unveiling the programme for the event in May, or offering tickets and refreshments. Bi-lingual writer, journalist, broadcaster and poet Angus Peter Campbell from South Uist spoke with luminescence about the “joie- de-vivre of language.”
He enjoys Ullapool Book Festival because writers stay for the whole duration of the event, rather than parachuting in for their own slot then making a swift exit.
Campbell switches between Gaelic and English with the ease of a fisherman who negotiates shifts in the weather by pulling on an oilskin and then discarding it. Similarly, he veers from comic observation to serious deliberation, taking the audience with him.
On the subject of writing – in any language – he had this to say: “Putting words together, even very beautiful words, is a lovely thing to behold, but it is not art. Art is when the spirit of language is released, or soars, so that both content and meaning become inextricably entwined, like a butterfly on the wing. A butterfly on a flower is one thing: on wing, however briefly and however frail, it is quite another.”
Campbell is a fan of modern European literature and its reach for universality. No longer does his work seek to tell the whole story. Instead, the reader is invited to attach their own meaning onto the pared down simplicity of his final edit. A short poem about a cow leaving the croft in the morning and returning at evening evokes an enduring image – without exposition or conclusion. Language, after all, says Campbell “is a raid on the inarticulate” he says
Drawing on the metaphor of Michelangelo removing the mass from marble to reveal the angel that lies within, Campbell seeks to lighten his work and pare it down to a minimum. And he is happy to hand it over to translators and let it become something else. In fact 60 of his poems are currently being translated, each one into a different tongue.
At 56 he now feels free of any obligation to represent the history of his culture and says he is more impressed by the birds outside his window than any of the bards that surround him.
Unsurprisingly, as someone who comes from an aural tradition, Campbell is preoccupied with the sound of language and posits the idea that poetry is “more auditory than authoritative, more sensuous than serious, a joyous display of verbal magic rather than any serious contribution to society”.
Campbell concluded his address by blessing the Ullapool Book Festival. “May you all sit outside the Ceilidh Place, or run down the streets naked or lie under an upturned boat somewhere in the old Bardic Tradition chanting to the dancing skies” Another enduring image to launch a successful and distinctive literary event.
The Ullapool Book Festival itself will feature contirbutions from fiction writers Iain Banks, Ron Butlin, Regi Claire, Jason Donald, Anne Donovan, Iain Finlay Macleod, Kevin MacNeil, Andrea McNicoll and James Robertson. Both Iain Banks and James Robertson will be giving exclusive readings from new works (the former reading is a National Library of Scotland event.
There will be poetry from Umberto Ak’abal (from Guatemala) and Scotland’s Stewart Conn and Tom Leonard. New non-fiction comes from Andrew Greig, and this year’s Saturday morning storyteller will be Jess Smith, who will also tell stories to children in the afternoon.
Add The Moira Monologues from Alan Bissett, writing workshops with both Alan and Kevin MacNeil, and the Mandy Morning sessions with local short story writer Mandy Henderson and published poet and author Mandy Haggith from the neighbouring parish of Assynt, plus some late night line ups and a limited number of places on writing workshops, and there is no shortage ofchoice.
The Ullapool Book Festival will run from 7-9 May. See link below for further information.
© Jenny McBain, 2010
