Verses of diversity

"Sometimes," the English poet Lavinia Greenlaw told the audience in Dún Laoghaire's Pavilion Theatre last Friday night, "you find your poems have been talking to each other behind your back."

Poetry Now Festival

Various venues, Dún Laoghaire

Perilous enough to have the poets at it, you might have thought, but to let the poems loose on one another at the same time: that's just asking for trouble. Not so, according to Greenlaw; references and resonances between poems was, she suggested, one of the most fulfilling aspects of publishing a collection.

The organisers of the 10th annual Poetry Now festival brought together some 20 poets of both Irish and international standing over the weekend in Dún Laoghaire, to meet and to merge, both in person and in poetry, as, outside, the sun beat down on the crowded pier.

But poems and sunshine get on best separated from one another, suggested the novelist Colm Tóibín, as he introduced another of the weekend's readings, from the Irish poet Conor O'Callaghan and his English peer Simon Armitage. While watching a film with the lights on and the day streaming through the window renders the experience patchy, the poem, he said, was like the covering of the windows so that subtlety and definition might be perfectly framed. And, in several of the readings which comprised this diverse and confident event, just such a framing was worth a sidestep into the darkness.

It was in a poetic world shadowed by darkness that the festival began, with a talk by Armitage on the landscape poems of his fellow Yorkshire native Ted Hughes. Quietly authoritative though Armitage's mapping of the poet's journey from grim entrapment to a type of liberation in his Calder Valley poems might have been, it was drowned out by the taped voice of Hughes, itself valley-deep, rolling and booming through the cadences of his own verse.

Armitage's own reading, with O'Callaghan, was his more memorable turn, with the poets proving an inspired marriage - though O'Callaghan, having begun with a poem juxtaposing a huffy wife and the bombs of the Luftwaffe, seemed concerned with staying in his present marriage, to fellow poet Vona Groarke. "Love you," he piped hopefully from the stage, as he realised that she might not be too keen on the choice.

O'Callaghan also divulged the secret sacred to every poet taking part in a two-person reading - the hope that the other poet will be "as crap as possible" - but neither he nor Armitage needed to worry on this score, their blend of the elegant, the zany and the brutally true falling on glad ears.

There were, of course, less successful matches - though each commanding on their own terms, the young Co Tyrone poet Nick Laird and the acclaimed Italian writer Valerio Magrelli seemed not quite right together. Some readings combined not two but three poets, and Laird, with his brave, bristly verse, would have fit well beside O'Callaghan and Armitage, while Magrelli, who meditated long and hard (literally - his English was difficult to understand) on the problems of translation, would have been an interesting partner for Celia de Fréine, reading in Irish and English, and Claude Esteban, the Paris-born poet who is a long-time collaborator with John Montague.

Coming onstage to read with Esteban his long, King Lear-inspired poem A Smile Between The Stones, Montague provided one of the highlights of the festival, and possibly of the festival's 10-year history, with his spirited, passionate reading - more a performance, really, swerving powerfully between poignancy and comedy; Montague as Lear (and, indeed, as the Fool), was a sight to enjoy.

Montague's own reading, with Greenlaw and the American poet CK Williams, was, however, the festival's undoubted high-point - Montague's personal introductions to his well-known poems, Greenlaw's arresting originality, and Williams' sheer command of metre, form and experience - with the beautiful prose poems of Maurice Riordan, in the Sunday afternoon closing session, as another sit-up-and-listen moment.

Though it drew the largest crowd, the Saturday reading of Margaret Atwood and Máire Mhac an tSaoi was far less enlivening; the latter poet was certainly the stronger, translating her Irish verse on sight because, as she put it, "there are probably a few here who could do with a translation". Though it aimed toward searing intensity and wry wit, Atwood's reading, too, could have done with a translation - into something more like the marvellous poetry presented by several of her counterparts in this festival.

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney was among those who attended every one of the readings - an imprimatur indeed, and an approving presence that must have been heartening to the three young poets nominated for the Strong First Book Award, Alan Gillis (the winner), Leanne O'Sullivan and Diarmuid Johnston, who read their work to a large audience.

But where there are presences, absences follow, and the most poignant of these was undoubtedly the winner of the award announced on the festival's first day, the Irish Times Poetry Now award: Dorothy Molloy, who died earlier this year as her first collection, Hare Soup, was going to print. "I felt again how separate we all are from each other," read CK Williams, from his poem Archetypes, and there were moments, even during the creativity and camaraderie of this fine festival, when his meaning rang true. But open the windows. "There must", as Maurice Riordan read, in his final, singing villanelle, "be some advantage to the light."

Belinda McKeon