Shore Poets' 20th Anniversary all twinkly in Voodoo Rooms

The sound of hip hop greeted me as I mounted the stairs to the Voodoo Rooms above the Cafe Royale and I thought I had perhaps arrived at the wrong venue. But no, upstairs is a bar with glorious Victorian decor, black leather seats and glass-bowled chandeliers, just the place for oysters in the side room, I'm told.

Across the way was a large auditorium where the Shore Poets were celebrating their 20th Anniversary. This room was equally black and gold, with velvet drapes twinkling with leds and the performance space overhung by a black and gold stucco frieze. Wow! Definitely the setting for some voodoo but SP created their own, if not black, a magical evening of poetry and music- in fact, more music than poetry, including Brighde,(pron Breege) Aonghas Phadriag Caimbeul/Angus Peter Campbell's teenage daughter on the bagpipes. SP have always included music in their evenings. As Alison Reeves, organizer of the musicians' spots said, the music is like a palate-cleanser between courses. Un aperitif. I quite agree. It certainly makes for a convivial, jolly event.

So not the usual setting for Shore Poets - there were reminiscences of the cold at the very first venue, at the Shore Art Gallery in Leith - the poetry event the brain child of Brian Johnstone and Ros Brackenbury (who is now a resident of Florida and sent a good will message from Key West) and of the various venues the SPs have graced, from Canongait's pub to the Wee Red bar in ECA (art school) over the years. Former members and present crowded the space - in particular the benign ghost of the late Gael Turnbull in a recording of him reading to an atmospheric piece of music.

Reminiscences, generous supplies of the famed lemon cake, speeches, toasts and far too few poems - rather modestly but strangely, few of the SP present members read - Janie McKie and Ian McDonough were selected to read from the SP's celebratory CD and were both superb, and several Open Mikers (including me) which was typically democratic of SP, but I would have loved to have had a poem read by each of the SPs.

However, lack of SP poetry was compensated for by an electrifying reading by the chief guest, Aonghas Phadraig Caimbeul/Angus Peter Campbell in Gaelic followed by English translations. His latest collection, Aibisidh/ABC (Polygon) will be on my Xmas list. Angus writes in the Gaelic tradition with contemporary twists, his concerns 'the fragmentaion of language and identity in our modern global age' as the Polygon flier puts it.

I loved 'The Prophecies of Coinneach Gobhar and Other Proverbs', with its updated nods to traditional Gaelic ones, especially one of Angus' versions:
'He who is idle
will be at the computer all day.'

Another poem that struck my imagination was 'Judas on an iceberg, as seen by St Brendan' - bringing together the sixth-century saint's voyage in a curragh to America via Iceland and Judas'

'...a chilling reward
for a solitary kindness done once

upon a time, before the thirty pieces
of silver left him here, shivering.'


Angus also read his award poem, commissioned in memory of the late Mark Ogle, (an early member of SP). Angus' poem is a response to Ogle's 'English Rain' written in the heat of Utter Pradesh, in nostalic longing:

'I want trousers soaked to the thighs
From walking through long grass
In fine misty rain that doesn't fall
But fastens glistening droplets to my clothes and skin...'

Angus' poem by contrast mentions rain which if you've been to South Uist, or anywhere in the Hebrides, you will recognize:

'I walked home after school; bent double in the wind;
with the rain pouring horizontal from the north.
In Uist, nothing ever fell down.'
(From 'Gravity'.)

The last line a reference also to why the theory of gravity could never have been discovered there.

As the event drew to a close and I had to leave, I was stopped in my tracks by Anne Connolly singing in Irish Gaelic in response to Campbell's Gaelic. A lovely way to end the evening- for me at least. I gather the event was still going strong with open mikers.
http://www.anguspetercampbell.co.uk/

http://www.shorepoets.org.uk/