Good Intent : Page 1 of 2

Story index:	Page 1: The review
	Page 2: Audio: the poems

Bloodaxe author Andrew Greig perfomed at this summer's Edinburgh International Book Festival. Our web site editor was there. Click on any poem title in red to download it as an MP3, or go to page 2 for all recordings in Wave (.wav) format, plus details.

The Spiegel Tent has a faded decadence to its gaudy decor.

Mirrored panels and pillars reflect and multiply the low lights. From the circular ceiling great swaggers of dark red velvet dip, then climb again to a central chandelier. It doesn't, but the air ought to reek of stale cigar smoke and spilt champagne.

This isn't the kind of tent they taught you to erect back when you still wore a woggle.

The Belgian impresario who built this travelling dance salon in the twenties couldn't have imagined it in straight-laced Edinburgh as part of the world's largest literary festival, nor would he have expected a full house at ten-thirty on a Saturday morning.

But then this event is called "Celtic Writers for Breakfast", and it's not so much Continental as The Full Scottish. Douglas Dunn, Alan Riach and Bloodaxe's own Andrew Greig are the poets on the menu, introduced by the Scottish Arts Council's Literature Director, Jenny Brown.

Andrew Greig grew up in Fife and published his first book "White Boats" in 1972. Since then he has written widely acclaimed poetry, fiction and non-fiction. His most recent collection "Into You" will be published by Bloodaxe in October this year.

Much of his earlier poetry reflected his great interest in climbing, and he has documented several expeditions to the Himalayas in poems and non-fiction books. Recently he suffered a brain illness that almost killed him.

Greig is 50, but looks 15 years younger. He got married five days ago, and the slab-faced men fidgeting at the back of the room are old climbing friends waiting to take him and his wife for a celebratory lunch.

Greig starts with two climbing poems from his 1990 collection "The Order of the Day", both set on Mustagh Tower, a Himalayan peak.

Tall and tanned he looks prematurely grey. His voice is gentle, his delivery careful and considered.

"One of the most powerful and charged moments of an expedition is when you arrive at the mountain, assuming you manage to find it - I've climbed the wrong one on a couple of occasions," he tells us.

"When we climbed Mustagh Tower, no-one had been there for thirty years. It had been empty, and this colossal theatre, these mountains all around you, although they're much bigger than you, it felt like they need you to be their witness, and to do the show," Greig says.

He reads "Back Again", where the climbers have come "to be both audience and show". His subtle, meditative writing is un-ornamented yet lyrical:

All day snow sank in the billy,
was boiled, drunk, peed, replenished
as we passed the mountain through us.

"One of my other favourite moments in an expedition is leaving and heading home," says Greig. "The stuff in the middle is largely unpleasant and mostly involves having bad headaches and fantasising about sardines and bacon sandwiches."

"It's lovely when you get home. But after about three days, you start wishing you were back out there again."

Askole, a village in Baltistan, was the first civilisation that Greig had seen in two months when he came down from Mustagh Tower. It looked, he says, like "one of those biblical plates you got with primary school bibles".

"Entering Askole" captures this sense of displacement, of the surreal. Goitres hang "like apples on the children's necks".

"Western Swing", published by Bloodaxe in 1994, is Greig's epic: a quest-poem where the grail is a penknife. Greig tells how the poem's origins lay in a case of the night-sweats.

"I woke up at about three in the morning convinced that I was about to die. My heart was thumping, I had a pain in my chest, and I thought 'Is this a hear-attack, or an early symptom of cancer?'"

"I hadn't written any poetry for nearly a year - which I found a painful condition - and a wee voice said in my head 'I am afraid'. Another one said 'There is much to be afraid of'."

"I realised that was the first true thing I had heard from myself in nearly a year. It became the beginning of the prologue to 'Western Swing'."

If the human heart were a high and mighty bluff,
set above a smashing sea
with a nearby rail link into the city and excellent local facilities,

such as opportunities for education and shopping,
and a really nice cricket ground next to the kirk yard,
wouldn't you call its potential unlimited?

And we've seen it wasted
on yet another grotty scheme.

Now Greig reads from his as yet unpublished book "Into You", an expansive life-affirming collection that takes in many different moods. Greig calls these poems "short-ish lyrics about life, death and Orkney".

"Norman's Goodnight" is a memorial to Greig's friend and inspirator Norman McCaig. "I miss him as a poet, I miss him as a man," Greig tells us, and reads the poem, genuinely moving in its restraint, dignity and refusal to sentimentalise.

"Into You" is a love poem in poetic prose:

She unbuttoned her shirt, straightened her shoulders, looked at me
in a spirit of free enquiry reminiscent of the early scientists once they'd cut free of theology and the Greek philosophers and looked upon nature as it really was

Alan Riach is a Scotsman who grew up in London and has just returned from 12 years in Waikato, New Zealand to be a Reader in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow.

He recently edited Scottish literary giant Hugh MacDiarmid's complete works in 16 volumes for Carcanet. He reads from his own new collection "Clearances", published simultaneously in New Zealand and Scotland.

His poetry ranges across vast distances: from New Zealand to the Blue Mosque to Glasgow Necropolis. Its subjects range from the miserable lot of a knight in medieval Scotland to the evocation of MacDiarmid and his contemporaries.

"Clearances" the title poem refers only allusively to the Highland Clearances. Instead it is an examination of the emotional mechanics of loss and time.

"My Two Feet" has the down-home charm of Edwin Morgan, for whose 80th birthday Riach wrote "The Jungle Books":

If you want to do anything really well,
some part of you must never,
ever,
ever
grow up.

Last to read is Douglas Dunn, the former Hull librarian and protégé of Philip Larkin. Now a Professor of English at St Andrews University, Dunn has won numerous awards including the Whitbread Prize, and is one of Britain's most respected poets.

Which is why it is with a heavy heart that I use the word "plagiarism". It's not a pretty word, and not one to bandy about. Yet, Douglas Dunn: j'accuse.

We journalists are thorough types. We take notes and log dates in our struggle to bring The Facts to you, the reading public.

And the fact is that at 11.15am on Saturday 25th August 2001 Dunn cracked the following joke:

"I often wish I were Dante. I could just begin, as Dante would have on these occasions by saying 'I'll just read the one poem'..."

It may have been Dunn's first appearance at the Book Festival that year, but it was the joke's second: Dundonian poet Don Paterson had used it eleven days earlier.

Of course we may never know who was the victim and who the perpetrator, but my suspicions are with Dunn.

"The Year's Afternoon" is Dunn's eleventh volume of poetry, a work of stocktaking and self-questioning. The writing is scholarly, dazzling in its references and the breadth of its allusion.

"If Only" is a poem of "adolescent sexual angst," says Dunn. It harks back to "A moment of Lambrettas on Eastwood Mains Road ... A moment populated by sports cars and resentment". There's the adolescence, now the sex: "She ran towards me hot from tennis... If only I knew then what I still don't know".

"Pre-" is metaphysical archaeology: "Creation was inching its way through millennia towards the invention of flesh and ethics".

This is clever, funny stuff, but a little dry. Rather more heartfelt is "The Year's Afternoon", a poem of deep self-analysis inspired by illness.

Also more emotional is "A Theory of Literary Criticism", written for Norman McCaig. "I called it that just to annoy Norman," Dunn jokes, "Words like 'theory', 'literary' and 'criticism' tended to get his goat".

"It was commissioned for Norman's 85th birthday, but I was very busy and didn't get round to writing it until the night of the celebration."

"I scribbled it on the back of the proverbial envelope on the train from Leuchars to Edinburgh [a journey of about an hour]."

"The train was delayed at Inverkeithing, thank god."

The poem is the story of an imaginary journey made by the famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's copy of Shakespeare's sonnets. It is about the immortality of great art, and the futility of analysing it.

"They discuss it in lecture theatres, but cannot kill it," observes this Professor of English.

Dunn closes with a few short humorous poems, including the immortal lines "Donald Dewar/ Was taller than you are."

This reading may not have been quite what the Spiegel Tent was constructed for, but it had more than its share of exoticism and high drama. And it left its audience with something more than that: an affirmation of the life-affirming vitality of the best modern poetry.