Listening in the Dark: Review of IAC’s Poetry Fest

How it’s Irish: Two of the three poets are Irish, and although Saskia Hamilton says she’s Dutch in her navel, “there’s an O’Neill back there.”

It was a feast of voices, accents, sense and sounds….Here we are, tucked in together on a sunny Saturday afternoon, language thrumming on the walls as we listen in the dark.

Each day last week a poem arrived in my e-mail from the Irish Arts Center. I eagerly read the work of the poets included in IAC’s Poetry Fest 2011. Their words carried me far beyond my cubicle in corporate America. It was a rare week, and I thought of friends–writers, artists, theatricals–who’d love a certain poem. So I forwarded the pieces by Leanne O’Sullivan, Michael Longley, Dennis O’Driscoll, Thomas Kinsella to Sydney, Dublin, Sacramento, even the Flatiron Building at the bottom of the avenue.

Saturday afternoon’s session at the IAC featured Saskia Hamilton (filling in for Leanne O’Sullivan), David Wheatley and Nick Laird. It was a feast of voices, accents, sense and sounds.

Saskia Hamilton is a highly-awarded, former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard who teaches at Barnard College. She read all new work from a collection-in-progress called Nightjar—“like the bird,” she said. Dark-haired, casually dressed, she read with ease and authority. I was struck by the following images (quoting now from my notes) referred to in a poem called “Midsummer Rain”:

and by these random lines:

“How quiet the room, listening, listening,” I scribbled. Here we are, tucked in together on a sunny Saturday afternoon, language thrumming on the walls as we listen in the dark.

With his mod hair and his dark clothing, David Wheatley might have been a hip schoolmaster or a mid-sixties pop star. His use of form (rhymes and near-rhymes and the feeling of balladry) and his subject matter (the natural world) are traditional. His genial nature and good humor set his work apart from its models. “I do like my creatures,” he said, and proved it by reading several poems about birds that were as light and darting and lovely as their subjects. Much delight was generated by a poem that answered, in one line, the question in its title:

His range is impressive and included a postcard poem, drinking songs, an homage to Philip Larkin and “Riptide” a piece about a Hawk jet zooming over a city dwelling, “the pilot shot free like a champagne cork”.

Wheatley lives, he says, between Ireland and England. This is true linguistically as well as geographically; he bridged the divide by reading one of his poems first in English and then in Irish and by reading two versions of the same poem, one with Irish references, and then again with British references.

Slim, boyish Nick Laird also teaches at Barnard. His poems draw upon a wealth of references (everything from John Masefield to Inspector Gadget) and sources. A poet can find a poem anywhere, even in graffiti on a library carrel–which is where Laird found the basis for his opener, an amusing riff on the mysterious “Alan”. The poem has hidden depths. “Alan” mutates into a God-like–or Godot-like–figure, the subject of increasingly frenzied speculation.

Several love poems came next, including one for Maud, his pug dog. “Pugs are a cross between E.T. and an Ewok,” he said. “You’re not supposed to buy them because they can’t breathe properly.“

He closed with the luminous “The Evening Forecast For The Region”, a poem about “insomnia and the gaps the mind makes when you can’t sleep”: