Back on the blog after an absence that saw me moving house
and procrastinating about how I want to use this thing – publish your work on
here and it causes problems for publishing in literary mags who want
exclusivity, publish anything too seriously analytical or essay-ish and you
might as well have submitted it as a feature. So, current conclusion is to abandon all
seriousness and see what happens.
It seemed as if the whole of poetry was at the TS EliotPrize Readings last night in the Royal Festival Hall: a big audience for a big
venue. The poets gathered their courage
as they took to the stage, tiny figures dwarfed by the gargantuan backdrop of a
screen that, paradoxically, showed their faces in close-up as they read.
In spite of the diminishing effect of the stage, the personalities
of these poets presented themselves. Of them
all, I had only seen Daljit Nagra before, with his deceptively light-hearted take
on British Asian life and the end of Empire, so was curious to gawp at the
rest. Bernard O’Donoghue appeared
distressingly nervous – so much so that I got distracted by the way he fussed
at the pocket on his jacket and evaded the camera with his downturned gaze. Esther Morgan was calm and assured – and read
for too long (I hear she is a favourite). John Burnside was garrulous and
funny, Sean O’Brien enormous and bass. David Harsent, I’m sorry to say, was a
touch forgettable, though our MC Ian McMillan insisted more than once that he
is ‘at the height of his powers.’ I do remember thinking he looked dressed for
a wake in his black suit. Carol Ann Duffy swaggered on stage and read
beautifully (though my friend asked me if she was deaf, so flat was the tone of
her voice at times). I wanted to cheer Leontia Flynn as she came on stage in
jeans and a rubbish blouse, her hair pulled back in a pony-tail and wearing no
make-up to speak of. I wanted to kick
her when she apologised for her poetry before she even got to reading, but she
was lucid and zeitgeisty and measured and good.
