Old hands deliver the best of Irish verse

The wonder of this year's Poetry Now Festival was in the familiar revisited, thanks in part to an elegy for Louis MacNeice and an award for Seamus Heaney, writes Eileen Battersby.

It was a good weekend for poetry, it was a great weekend for Irish poetry, and an outstanding one for poets from Ulster. While Ireland's footballers are fated to experience the contrasting swings of capricious fortune, her poets invariably succeed.

The 12th staging of the international Poetry Now festival, the third and final under director poet John McAuliffe, began with a lecture about the discovery of previously unpublished work by US poet Elizabeth Bishop, who died in 1979, and concluded with an engaging celebration of Louis MacNeice. What took place in between, including magisterial if easeful readings by MacNeice's fellow Belfast men, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, and Seamus Heaney winning the Poetry Now award from an impressive short list, was pretty good too.

Poetry festivals enter difficult territory. Somehow, it is easier to sit in a theatre and listen as a prose writer reads his or her work. Story takes over, but poetry by its musing, solitary nature is the most intimate aspect of that private privilege known as reading. There are poems that you simply don't want to hear read aloud. On Saturday evening. Californian poet Jane Hirshfield mentioned in passing that she knows what it is like to have written a poem about a specific something, only to discover that a reader sees its meaning as entirely different. There is no doubt that some poets are blessed with the physical voice to match their work; others aren't. Some are natural performers and subtle readers; others are not.

Still, poetry readings tend to inspire the audience, which is why one races out to the foyer to purchase the texts from the eager bookseller who waits with a stall full of wares. Books are bought and the buyers race off, confident of the riches they are clutching. This is what happens, particularly if the work is new to you. At last year's Poetry Now, I did just that, pounced on the sole copy of Adam Zagajewski's Selected Poems, and scurried off with my prize, a new voice to listen to, a new imagination with which to engage.

This year was different, much of the wonder was achieved in the familiar revisited. This festival in the centenary year of MacNeice also coincided with the first anniversary of the death of John McGahern, and it was beautifully touching to hear so many poets referring to a writer who explored memory and emotion as carefully as they do. Words didn't come easily to McGahern, he cared too much about language for that. Instead, he thought and considered, he weighed each word with a deliberation as intense as his description of an encounter between an estranged father and son.

Michael Longley also took his audience on a journey through known waters, and it worked - several people described his reading on Friday night as the finest they had ever experienced. Longley is a tremendous reader, influenced by themes of fathers and sons, by nature and the classical motifs that have become central to his work. The youthful romantic still lingers in the Father Christmas face, his voice is gentle and caressing, if deceptively authoritative. Here is a master assured of his craft; after all, it was Longley who took a lengthy break from active writing only to return the stronger artist with Gorse Firesin 1991, which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and was followed by The Ghost Orchidin 1995, The Weather in Japan(2001) and almost three years ago, Snow Water.

"Since my Collected Poemshas recently been published," said Longley, "I 'honoured' earlier selves and read poems from the 1960s, Persephoneand Swans Matingand In Memory of Gerard Dillon: 'You walked, all of a sudden, through/The rickety gate which opens/To a scatter of curlews,/An acre of watery light . . . '" He then read The Linen Industry(from The Echo Gate, 1979), a love poem grounded in images from the linen industry, "Since it's like a bereavement once the labour's done/To find ourselves last workers in a dying trade," and in acknowledgement of "the great events in Belfast on Monday" read Ceasefire, with its powerful, classical and timeless themes, as Priam sighs, "I get down on my knees and do what must be done/And kiss Achilles' hand, the killer of my son."

Memories of his father continue to shape Longley's poetic vision and he read two war poems from Snow Water, Harmonicawith its haunting discovery, "our souls are air,/They hold us together", and The Frontin which he too is a soldier, "marching up the Front to die" and he sees "the dead and wounded" shockingly, "all younger than my son/Among them came my father who might have been my son". He read two new poems, one which had been influenced by the citation for his father's military cross, the other a love poem, Cloudberries.

Peter Fallon, creator and presiding genius of The Gallery Press, which he founded as an 18-year-old with a mission, has served literature well by publishing work by Ireland's finest poets and playwrights in books that are as physically beautiful as they are important. Fallon, writer and farmer, is in tune with nature and has a practical sensibility. Here is a man who knows how to rejoice when a 1961 Massey Ferguson tractor starts on the second attempt. He appeared on the Poetry Now stage first as poet, and then in his capacity as an admirer, collaborator and publisher of one of the finest poets of our time, Derek Mahon, who last week in London received a lifetime achievement award.

"Several of his poems are masterpieces," said Fallon, who praised Mahon's "classical restraint". His reading on Saturday night in the company of the former US poet laureate Robert Hass was sold out and fellow poets and writers gathered to hear Mahon. His jaunty intelligence and wit dictated the proceedings, the austere, sophisticated beauty of the work with its awareness of poetry, painting and history, as always seduced. A European poet who looks to Yeats and MacNeice, Derek Mahon is unnervingly gifted, possessed of a distinctive neutral accent and immaculate, ironic timing - he is also very funny and as shrewd as only a Belfast man can be, pointing out: "If I take away all the references to other poets and artists and works of art, it would be a very slim volume indeed." He explained why he would not read his MacNeice elegy, but did read Afterlives (for James Simmons): "I wake in a dark flat/To the soft roar of the world./Pigeons neck on the white/Roofs as I draw the curtains/And look out over London/Rain-fresh in the morning light." Life experience has added weight to the concluding stanza with its sombre homecoming: "But the hills are still the same/Grey-blue above Belfast./Perhaps if I'd stayed behind/And lived it bomb by bomb/I might have grown up at last/And learnt what is meant by home."

He referred to the 1990s as a period of writing longer, "bigger poems that don't always work". Mahon's air of confident absentmindedness made the reading appear almost casual, as did throwaway comments such as on the business of translation, or versions, of which he has done many - from Sophocles and Juvenal, to Baudelaire, Valéry, Rilke and Pasternak: "If you don't know the language at all, you can work much faster."

Harbour Lightswon last year's The Irish TimesPoetry Now award and from that collection, the vibrantly atmospheric poem Jean Rhys in Kettner'scame alive, as he conjured the presence of an elderly lady keeping the world at bay from the safety of her favourite pub: "I'm crouching here in the corner, a kind of ghost/but safe with my Craven 'A' and Gordon's gin/wearing a cloche hat and an old fox fur/and skimming Vogue with my distracted air. . . - somewhere I lived once in another age/with thunder, magic and the scent of jasmine." He also read New Wave, a type of French novel, or is it a French film - such is the sensual, strongly cerebral yet physical art of Mahon.

BOB HASS, WHOSE collections include Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishesand Sun Under Woodcame on stage, remarking how one of his graduate students is writing a thesis on Derek Mahon's poetry. Hass the teacher and generous reader of the work of others may have overshadowed Hass the poet, but the benign, kindly presence of the man himself - most movingly when he considered MacNeice's Coda - will have won new readers for his own poems, which sing from the heart.

On Sunday afternoon, a panel of poets, including Katie Donovan, Bob Hass, Maurice Riordan and Christopher Reid, sat at a table and read the work of Louis MacNeice. Michael Longley praised MacNeice's "most wonderful" variety and quoted his own astute introduction to his selection of MacNeice's work from 1998 (Faber) when asking: "What other 20th century poet writing in English explores with such persistence and brilliance all that being alive can mean? Perhaps only Yeats." He read Thalassaand The Mayflyand The Introduction, and most effectively of all read Mahon's elegy to MacNeice, In Carrowdore Churchyard, having recalled the day Longley in the company of Mahon and Heaney visited MacNeice's grave, "all contemplating elegies".

As a member of the privileged triumvirate of judges, including Maurice Riordan and Niall MacMonagle, entrusted with the destination of The Irish Times/Poetry Now Award, I can testify to the current health of Irish poetry, particularly from Ulster. Seamus Heaney's District and Circlewon from an impressive short list of Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Catriona O'Reilly and David Wheatley.

Heaney paid tribute to his fellow runners in the race and read The Blackbird of Glanmoreas well as a new poem about a returning to life from illness. In a festival which included the inspired participation of China's Bei Dao, the abiding image that will endure is that of Longley, Mahon and Heaney, all very much younger, standing in 1963, by the grave of Louis MacNeice.