Landscape and the elements that shape it can be cruel levellers. Take a 2,000-year-old cashel perched on a limestone hill on Inis Mor, where several international writers and many international readers gathered yesterday for the second Aran Islands poetry and prose festival.
Perhaps it should be "staggered" rather than "gathered", for a fair share of the 200 participants who had travelled on the ferry from Galway's Ros a Mhil that morning found the rocky track to the dun above Cill Ronain a mite treacherous. Others, like Donegal poet Cathal O Searcaigh and his Nepalese companion, Prem Prasad Timalsina, a Hindu brahmin, were in their element.
"A hippy happening!" Mr O Searcaigh exclaimed, as a torch-bearing sentry in robes paced the outer wall, and Ceoltoiri Arainn tempted the audience in.
Dun Eochalla, by the Napoleonic signal tower and an abandoned 19th-century lighthouse, is Inis Mor's less popular stone fort.
It was here that Celtic ranchers reared cattle and sheep and goats. Unlike Dun Aenghusa, it is not bound by the Atlantic. The 48 million stones comprising its 1,484km of wall are almost intact, and provide welcome shelter from stinging winds. Fortunately, the forecast rain held off for much of yesterday. The festival line-up included John Montague, Edna O'Brien, Joyce Carol Oates, Mr O Searcaigh, Roddy Doyle, Sean Rowntree, Frank McCourt, Michael Ondaatje and a Chinese dissident author, Xue Di.
Opened by the poet Mary O'Malley and Olwen Gill of the co-op, the readings began with a contribution from Dara O Conaola, a nephew of the writer, and a reciter, Dara Beag, and originally from Inis Meain. or is noted was evident at the outset. "Can't hear you !" yelled several north Americans as Mr O Conaola took to the microphone. "Saves time, doesn't it," the woman then observed with satisfaction to those around her.
In what have might seemed like an unnatural progression, the US author and poet Joyce Carol Oates took to the lectern and demonstrated why she is such a prolific writer. She dwelt on human weakness, rather than strength (such as anger, which she said was enjoyed much more by men) greed (as in a poem called The Dollar Sign dedicated to Donald Trump) and loneliness.
Ms Oates's excerpt from a novel, which she said she wrote in a "prolonged panic attack", could have been so out of place. Instead, her description of a pathetic blonde US actress by the name of Norma Jean Baker hanging out of a helicopter as she was flown in to entertain US troops in Korea held the audience spellbound; as the wind rose, one could almost hear the rotor blades whirring above. By contrast, the grande dame of Irish writing, Edna O'Brien, seemed almost out of place at first, as she began an excerpt from a forthcoming novel about an Ireland that is slipping away. Ms O'Brien had changed from runners into shoes for her performance.
As she ignored the breeze whipping her pages of text, Ms O'Brien came into her own. Summoning up images of brown khaki fields and crazed and phantom lusts, she banished a temporary restlessness.
Thanking her afterwards, Mary O'Malley recalled that in her time growing up, one learned sin (or was it guilt?) from the priests, Latin from the nuns, and passion from Edna O'Brien.
The Aran Islands International Prose and Poetry Festival continues at the mainland location of the O'Flaherty lecture theatre in NUI Galway today with readings by Xue Di of China, four US poets, Rita Dove, Mark Doty, Donald Hall and Rose Styron, Mary O'Malley, and a lecture on James Joyce by Prof Kevin Barry, of NUI Galway.
