Arresting days at Cuirt

Freshness, rigour and commitment to literature - as well as fun - were there in spades at Cúirt, writes Belinda McKeon

It's true what they warn of, those lovers of literature who gather in Galway every year on this threshold of summer, eager for the excitements and excesses of what has become Ireland's best festival of writing. Beware the Cúirt comedown, beware the post-Cúirt blues, because they will have you half-wishing your year away, longing for its return. The 20th year of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature has come and gone, and it has brought once more that chemistry of talent, promise and sheer achievement that keeps Cúirt firmly on a pedestal entirely its own.

Last year, attendees delighted in offerings from the literature of the new Europe, from Hungary, from Poland, from the squares of Prague, from Estonia and Slovenia, and at the mingling of their voices with voices from and closer to home. This year, the eastern European strain was no less powerful, with an emphasis on poets from Russia and Romania, and in with them were sounds of Africa, unforgettable in every sense, echoing both with pain and with hope.

There, too, were voices of England and of Indonesia, of Belarus and of Belfast, of Galway and of Germany, and, enriching the dynamic, a clutch of fine American writers wonderful in their tension between defiance and devotion to their native land. "One advantage of being here," said the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell, as he started his reading with his Romanian peer (and, unbelievably on both counts, fellow octogenarian) Nina Cassian, "is that my name is never mispronounced. Though I also think that someone is calling me all the time."

The irony is that they probably were. They were probably calling on Cassian, too, and on the novelist Desmond Hogan, the activist Ken Wiwa, or the impishly brilliant young Minsk poet Valzhnya Mort: calling on them for repeats of their stunning performances, for more of their starkly original work. Because although this was a festival of writing, part of what it drove home most strongly for me was how seamlessly bound were the acts of truly great writing and of performance, of not just giving voice but giving vivid shape and realisation to that writing's words.

Unable to be at the opening reading which had so many people still reeling even the next day (JM Coetzee, reading from unpublished prose - see right - and the Nigerian novelist Helon Habila), my first encounter was with an author I had honestly believed I might never see in the flesh, such is his caution where publicity and public appearances are concerned: the Galway novelist Desmond Hogan, whose 1976 book The Ikon Maker both created and cracked a striking new mould in Irish writing.

The myth that has grown up around Hogan posits him as a recluse, inhabiting a caravan somewhere in the south-west and communicating only by postcard, and I had heard something about him fleeing a reading in Galway late last year after hearing himself introduced. And though the man who strode onstage, glowering out at the audience, rummaging slowly in his battered bag, seemed close to this myth - made me think, for a moment, that I had wandered into a Beckett play - the reading which followed made sorry shards of the prejudices with which I had come.

Hogan was magnificent, prowling the stage with book in hand, shunning the lectern to inhabit, rather than to intone, one of the strange, dark stories he has been quietly producing (and sending to the Munster journal Southword) in recent years; a story of longing and of betrayal, and of coming to accept the self. Afterwards, as I asked him to sign my copy of The Ikon Maker, I realised that I was shaking. From him came an energy; not a comforting energy, but a gripping one. Maybe he will not appear again. Maybe he will, as his new stories are this year to be published by Lilliput. Either way, to see him, to hear him, to watch him step, for sections, into the shadows of the stage, was something rare.

Around me in the bookshop on that day, new fans of Hogan's fellow reader, Ronan Bennett, were snapping up copies of his 1997 novel The Catastrophist - and so, too, I suspect, were some who had already read it. Bennett's decision, during his reading, to edit out what can only be described as the sexy bits of an excerpt set largely in a hotel bedroom caused silent consternation among audience members of both genders.

Whether the move comprised a clever sales device or surprising prudishness, it did not take away from the experience of hearing Bennett read from his most recent novel, Havoc in its Third Year, and drawing out the contemporary context for that masterful portrait of religious and political cruelty in a 17th-century world.

Unfortunately shyer of delving into religious and political subjects, at least on this occasion, was the formidable critic Denis Donoghue, who applied himself to the problems of autobiography as he gave the Anne Kennedy Memorial Lecture; though interesting, he circled the subject a little too vaguely and the frequent evidence of his mind's vast range roused, for me, a sense of wasted opportunity.

But it was an isolated disappointment on that day; along with Bennett and Hogan, there was an arresting reading from Sussex poet Sasha Dugdale, which gave, in her own words, "form to the formless". Her translations of a number of the Eastern European poets, including Evgeny Rein and Tatiana Shcherbina, meanwhile, gave equally fine - indeed, invaluable - form to that which would otherwise remain beyond. And a first encounter with the much hyped debut novel of Tyrone writer Nick Laird offered stimulation. Laird's prose excerpt, witty though frustratingly loose in structure, suggested that it is as a poet that he might best develop, and his poems, especially those about his father, stay on in the mind. Other poems to stay in the mind were the elegaic lines of the Enniskillen writer Francis Harvey - another child of the 1920s, and another who proves Adrian Frazier's observation, on the night of the Kinnell-Cassian reading, that "genius keeps you young". Harvey's poems of life and death, his reach back through the generations, his tie to the land, to the weather, were deeply moving.

Afterwards, I bought his book of poems and asked him to inscribe it to my parents. They are not readers of poetry, and maybe I will never give it to them. But it felt right; Harvey, with his art of honesty, opened some door. And so, too, did Cassian and Kinnell; her sense of devilment mixed with a knowledge of suffering, his knowing, compassionate poems of everything from oatmeal to insomnia, from feathering to fatherhood. It was easy, listening to Kinnell, to understand that he deserved his Pulitzer; for me, however, it was a lot more difficult to see the apparent depth, the interrogation of self and of art, in the work of another winner of that prize, Franz Wright, who read along with Niyi Osundare on Saturday morning.

While Osundare (Nigeria-born, son of a magician and speaker of Noruba) roused great pleasure in the audience with a poetry so vibrant in rhythm and in music that it frequently gave rise, quite literally, to song, his writing and that of Wright fell short of the thinking, the hard consideration, the pushing beyond a common thought into pure originality, that some of their fellows displayed.

That freshness, that rigour, that commitment to writing and all that it demands, was strikingly evident in the verse of the Romanian and Russian contingent - the poets Nichita Danilov and Tatiana Shcherbina, in particular - and in the searing work of Valzyhna Mort, marvellously different in form and in delivery, which dazzled all fortunate enough to hear her translations, and to be battered by the moods of the Belarus language which she is passionately battling to save from obscurity. At 23, Mort was a fitting companion for the 21-year old Cork poet Leanne O'Sullivan. Both poets are talented; maybe it's that what is new and unfamiliar is wonderful, but Mort's poems dominated the reading by far.

Two extraordinarily well performed and realised productions from Galway Youth Theatre, meanwhile - Paraic Breathnach's Through the Coole Door, and Ciaran Carson's devilishly fine new version of Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court, directed by Rod Goodall and Max Hafler respectively - went further to showcase the genuinely staggering talent on offer from younger artists in Galway. It is no exaggeration to say that these two shows were among the best productions I have seen onstage in the last year.

There was some work at Cúirt, however, that dominated in all the wrong ways; the readings of the Irish poet Colm Breathnach and the Californian novelist (and now, apparently, poet) Maxine Hong Kingston were remembered chiefly for how interminable they seemed.

Both poets went long over their allotted time, but at least in Breathnach's case the poetry was intelligent and truly felt. Kingston's reading, however, seemed naïve and self-indulgent, stringing together largely facile meditations on her plan for world peace and the utterances of her childhood, and managing to insult practically every member of the audience with her declaration that she was turning to poetry, as it was so much easier and so much more fun.

But maybe this is too harsh. After all, she was right on one count, and proven so by countless writers at Cúirt, from the slam poets to the bardic brunchers, from the hilarious prose of Percival Everett, to the wry observations of Mike McCormack, from the cheeky rise and fall of Paul Muldoon's verse to Carson's take on Merriman. She was right, that is, about literature being fun. And even if it isn't, Cúirt will make it so.