Harsent, O'Brien, Muldoon at Cheltenham

Cheltenham Literature Festival - David Harsent, Sean O'Brien and Paul Muldoon, October 14, 2011


Jo Shapcott introduced some very top-end Premiership poets as her 'superheroes' in what must have been a poetry event of the year in these islands.
David Harsent is calm and unhurried as a reader, all clarity of expression and diction. His poems of considered, unflamboyant resonance included Ghosts and several of the 'blood-related' poems from Night as well as poems on his loss of faith in Mark Rothko's abstract. I wonder if that's something that happens to you in middle-age. I hope that it doesn't happen to me. But it's taken a long time for the idea of David Harsent to dawn on me and I'm grateful for it. He finished with a new poem commissioned on the subject of 1971, which I hoped might concern Marc Bolan and T. Rex, but was in fact about Mutually Assured Destruction.
Sean O'Brien is by turns darkly political and grimly funny. I was grateful that he did the wonderful Elegy for his mother and it was interesting to hear the background to poems on Marmite and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Jeudi Prochain and Narbonne were other more significant parts of a set that was just right. I don't know if I discerned a somewhat mellower Sean than was evident in the demeanour of the younger model but the fire is by no means fading yet..
As Paul Muldoon remarked on the way to the book signing, one doesn't like poetry readings to go on too long. Well, no, but surely you do more than one poem. To be fair to Muldoon, it was a long poem in eleven parts, Wayside Shrines, and a paragon example of his immaculate music, packed internal rhymes and measured cadence. He is a superb reader to listen to even in comparison with the exalted company here in an hour of genuine class act poetry. Unmissable really in a time that might one day become regarded as The Age of Muldoon.