Double whammy for Literature Festival
The Centre was honoured to host rare visits from two renowned poets this week, as Ciaran Carson and Jorie Graham gave readings as part of Manchester Literature Festival.
Ciaran Carson appeared on Monday 20 October, and book-ended his reading with recitals on a tin whistle which emerged from his book bag. He connected these and his poetry to the Irish song genre the aisling, in which the poet is visited in dreams by a beautiful 'sky-woman' representing Ireland, who implores him to wake up and write.
He gave a selection of readings from his brand-new Collected Poems, including 'Belfast Confetti', '1798' and 'Manifest', before turning to his recent book For All We Know. This represented a turning away from his traditional subject matter of Northern Irish life during the conflict and an attempt to write about love, which he said he found difficult until he rejected the false, first person voice and adopted a third person perspective.
The book comprises two sections of 35 poems each, with the same titles repeated across both sections. Each poem is a sonnet of 14 or 28 lines, with every line containing 14 syllables. Carson read pairs of poems including 'Hotel del Mar', 'Revolution' and 'The Fetch', an Irish term describing the sighting of one's doppelganger as an omen of death.
After another burst of tin whistle the poet finished with a short piece written while awaiting collection by the Centre that afternoon - a further CNW contribution to the modern literary canon!
On Thursday 23rd, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham began her reading with one of the five 'prayers' she wrote during the US bombing of Baghdad. 'Praying Attempt of April 19, '04' was developed from the desperate feelings and phrases which came into her head when she awoke as the bombings took place, which she wrote down in the dark of her room.
She then turned to her new book Sea Change, which imagines the present from a future standpoint and is enthralled by the existence of things we take for granted: tap-water, delineated seasons and sunrises which are sources of beauty rather than fear.
'Embodies', which takes a plum tree coming into both blossom and fruit in the autumn as its starting point, was followed by 'Later in Life'; a bid to capture "...the first whiff of summer at the end of spring." Lines longer than a typical human breath are cantilevered over very short lines, in a structure which mirrors the I-beam manoeuvred by builders in the poem.
'Nearing Dawn' describes a sunrise at Omaha Beach near the poet's home in France, but was the subject of her favourite piece of fan-mail from an African reader who thought it perfectly described a sunrise there. Her final selection, 'Futures', aims to impress the reality of what is happening to the planet, and overcome the sense that it is the stuff of science fiction.
Both poets took questions about their work, views and experiences at the end of their readings, before signing books and joining the audience for drinks in the Martin Harris Centre foyer.