`This is as close as I'll get to hearing Homer," said one visiting American poet as Aran Islands writer Dara Bheag O Flatharta finished his recitation. At that moment, a gap closed briefly as two traditions and two languages met. In the fort of Dun Eochla on Inis Mor, in a natural amphitheatre overlooking Connemara and the other two islands, many of those present realised that Homer, who also wrote of a seafaring tradition, might be at least as much at home here in the sunshine or as in the halls of Harvard or Princeton.
Despite its title, the Aran Islands International Poetry Festival, a series of workshops, manuscript consultations and readings by both well-known and student writers, was conceived, marketed and largely organised in the US for an American audience as a teaching vehicle for younger poets. And in the most part, it took place on the mainland, at University College, Galway. By the time Wednesday arrived, many had realised the island trip was what they had come for.
"So far, we might as well be doing this in Indiana," one poet had complained to me of the reading and workshops up to the night before.
The day started auspiciously: the sun blazed down as an array of international poetic talent, including the great Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, walked up the street from Kilronan pier. Cathy Gill from the Heritage Centre and Olwen Gill of the Inis Mor Writers' Group welcomed us as the ferry pulled in, and escorted us to the hall, to fresh scones and tea and coffee. Traditional musicians played a few tunes and then the Young Writers Institute, a US group, presented the writer Edna O'Brien with a Special Achievement Award. But it wasn't only the Americans who appreciated her. After reading a short extract from her latest novel, she was presented with a silver brooch commissioned by Ionad Arainn.
O'Brien said it was an honour and a great pleasure to accept it in the presence of Czeslaw Milosz, as one of the world's greatest poets sat in the village hall in Kilronan, and was welcomed to the island in Irish and in English. Somehow, what might have started as a tourist event had changed, and the rest of the day was transformed by island hospitality.
After being bussed to the great round fort of Dun Eochla, Padhraic O Tuairisc gave a brief but riveting history of the fort and Eavan Boland read with authority and conviction. Then there followed a brief history of Island writers: Breandan O Hehir, Liam O Flatharta, and a brilliant evocation of Mairtin O Direain by Connla O Dulaine SJ. I contributed to the readings in the afternoon which also featured island writers Michael Gill and Sean Roantree.
Refreshed, and back at UCG yesterday, there was a rare opportunity to hear Milosz read from his own work. He read poems in both Polish and English "as a tribute to my translators" but "you will notice I sing much more when I read in Polish".
In a strong voice, his accent still marked despite years in California, Milosz read for close on an hour and we were transported into the world of the marvellous. He read poems articulating the unimaginable horrors perpetrated on his country and love poems that told us his job was to glorify things just because they are. He read poems about God, about Winnie the Pooh and about his cat. This was poetry, transforming and magical.
Earlier in the week, US-based Irish poet Eamonn Grennan's reading of a poem about his young daughter gathering mussels in Tully held the visiting Americans, and me, spellbound. The workshops and field trips to Coole and Thoor Ballylee began in earnest on Monday and Bridgit Pegeen Kelly, winner of the Yale Younger Poets' Award, read poetry that was fantastic and strong. I had never heard of this poet and discovering her work was one of the things that made the conference worthwhile.
The US poet laureate Robert Hass read his finely crafted poems with warmth and wit on Tuesday afternoon, in a city still only dimly aware it was visited by so much talent. There is a delicacy and a stillness in Hass's poems that is uplifting and his use of myth is deft and shows a perfect understanding, surprisingly rare among poets, of the relationship of ordinary people to their own mythos, so that there is in his work no sense of false appropriation.
A poem about a beautiful Japanese woman and a man's desire for her, and the withering of that desire when she tells him she has had a double mastectomy, was pared down and perfect, free of that false empathy that causes so many poems to perish when men write about women. There is a remarkable honesty in Hass's writing about human relationships, nowhere more devastating than when he read about a son and an alcoholic mother, yet his poems display a fierce tenderness.
The festival ends today
