A chill Atlantic wind blows through the Spanish Arch into the City Museum where the cream of the arts in Galway mills about hoovering up wine and savouries as if there is no tomorrow. A blue-clad youth orchestra cranks out ‘Hey Jude’. Mayor Tom Costello says that when the swallow and the cuckoo come, the festivals follow after. Normally after a few swallows I go cuckoo on these occasions myself, alas I am on the wagon.
The poet Hanberry, whose face is all swelled up from root canal work, joins me glumly for a sparkling water. Someone introduces me to Jennifer Johnson and Martyn Turner. Renaissance man P Breatnach gets off a few zingers in the teanga, David Niland and Maura Kennedy toss in their four cents worth and bearded Iraqui war vet poet, Cúirt writer-in-residence and all round nice guy Brian Turner declares the 23rd Writers’ Festival open. Flash go the press bulbs, press person Eimear O’Brien presses my press passes into my hand and the free bar over, and night falling soon, O. Tyaransen slips on his shades and away. Hey ho, let’s go.
Sebastian Barry (as readers not living on Mars will already be aware) has produced a successor to man-Booker-nominated bestseller A Long Long Way, The Secret Scripture, and in reading from which, he had the simultaneously enviable and unenviable task of kick-starting the festival. He has clearly inherited his mother’s histrionic gift. Dispensing with the lectern he delivered a splendidly self-deprecating performance as his centenarian heroine, eliciting many laughs and a lot of applause.
As Jennifer Johnston remarked seating herself (as well she might at 78) and requesting that the lights be lowered so as not to blind her, ‘folly that’. This in her quiet way she did, with a nicely understated monologue. A widow recollects her bumpy marriage and her partner’s infidelity with another man, in a reading combining the wistfulness of an Alan Bennet old dear with a steely resignation all her own. This too earned its well merited approbation.
Emerging blinking onto the sunny steps of the Town Hall Theatre I encounter the three graces in the form of Nell McCafferty, Evelyn Conlon and Rita Ann Higgins. “A woman smoking, eh?” I remark to la Conlon (who is down to twenty a week). “We’ll be wanting the vote next,” she says, exhaling a cloud of Virginia’s finest.
I pass on to the tiny Nun’s Island Theatre to witness The Galway Youth Theatre in an updated version of The Lysistrata Of Aristophanes by Max Hafler. Aristophanes, like myself and Pope Benedict after him, considered war A BAD THING. The Peloponnesian wars had been rolling along for twenty years when his satire first played Athens one Saturday in 411 BC. Basically it’s the old ‘Women go on sex strike till men stop fighting’ shtick. This production is full of song, choruses and enviably energetic ensemble work. Conor Geoghan as the Prime Minister, a sort of Haughey on helium and his sidekick Eoin Butler Thornton, a strange blending of Marilyn Monroe and Jerry Lewis, seem destined for great things.
Belfast poet Alan Gillis is described as coming from where Michael Longley meets John Copper-Clarke. I hope this doesn’t mean that he combines Cooper-Clarke’s gravitas with Longley’s manic irreverence but no, but no, he turns out to be quite a hit with one and all. He is a plump, jolly sort in spectacles and a linen suit and has one of those faces that look the same if you turn them upside down. His witty poems demonstrate as much familiarity with Rock ‘n’ Roll as English Lit. Naturally the grumpy old classicist beside me hates him but I like him enough to buy both his books.
His fellow poet Piotr Sommer read several poems in Polish, a language with which, despite the Evening Herald’s supplement, I remain unfamiliar. The English translations didn’t do much for me either. Doubtless they were worthy. Doubtless I was not.
Later local writer Mike McCormack read a darkly comic short story about DHRINK and coronaries, drawing many a knowing chuckle from the crowd. The collection of which this forms a part cannot come out too quickly for me but, as he tells me later, art is long, and he is still engaged in putting manners on them. Maria McCann, whose As Meat Loves Salt was one of the Observer’s Fifty Most Underrated Novels of 2007, however, tells me that she is 46,000 words into her next one already.
Laterstill, Seamus Martin subjects Asne Seirstad to a little light grilling about her bestselling The Bookseller Of Kabul and her account of post-war Chechnya, The Angel Of Grozny. Ms Seirstad proves slippery as an eel and shit hot at English, which, (she being Norwegian) is by no means her first language.
EG. S Martin: (about the Bookseller) “You criticised him”
AS: “No”
SM: “You left him open to criticism”
AS: “He left himself open to criticism”
This was good fun and ended up more or less a draw though there was no contest as to who was the biggest draw when it came to the signing afterwards.
After this things get pretty blurry, but unforgettable moments include a dinner at which renowned poet and campaigner against apartheid Breyten Breytenbach told some excellent Irish jokes, a walk (all too short alas) with the tall, Thurberesqye, stomach-bug-suffering, septuagenarian, American poet CK Williams, whose new poem, ‘Foundation’, was probably the best thing I heard all week, a world-league reading by Octogenarian and 14th US Poet Laureate, Donald Hall, whose warm New Hampshire drolleries would make a rat laugh and whose elegies for his wife would melt a heart of stone, and a platinum plated performance by Wendy Cope whose act had all the improvisational insouciance of a microsurgeon.
It is Sunday. Somewhere O. Tyaransen is sleeping off the Snow Patrol party I met him coming from somewhat wearily last night. I sit under the speakers at a small round table in the King’s Head bar. Little John Nee (fourth best ukelele player in North Galway) strumming that instrument sings as only he can. Then melodica. He asks me to become his manager. I ring my mother and suggest she gets a job.
A classical pianist joins me. He is recovering from his fourth heart attack and treats this by joining me in wolfing down a plate of rashers, eggs, sausages, beans, black and white pudding, tomatoes, toast and what to our mutual irritation turns out to be a big mushroom rather than a slice of liver. Jinx Lennon comes over to shake hands with us. I resist saying ‘Hi Jinx’. Jaws hitherto engaged in mastication drop as he launches into ‘City Of Styrofoam Cups’. Strong men weep as he and Paula Flynn tackle the lovely ‘St Brigids Shrine’. Can it get any better than this?