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Kathleen Jamie maps out new landscape at book festival

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Enormous, arrogant, brash, entreating, wheeler-dealing, the Fringe is nevertheless not the only show in town by any means. Up in Charlotte Gardens, just off Princes Street, is the more sedate, Guardian-sponsored, Edinburgh international book festival. After a hard day’s night at the Fringe Kathleen Jamie, Scotland’s poet of landscape and the natural world, who lives with her family alongside the river Tay, provided the perfect morning-after antidote early on Thursday, fresh and clear like a burn running into a loch. Jamie’s collection The Overhaul won the Costa prize earlier this year, and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. She captivated her audience at the packed Guardian Spiegeltent with a number of fine poems from that book, and then spoke of her latest work, Frissure, a collaboration with artist Brigid Collins, which she described as an intimate and personal look at her own body and its scars, and mapping its landscape, after her operation for breast cancer. “To be healed is not to be saved from mortality, but rather, to be released back into it.” She spoke of going to sit for the book in Collins’ studio, “a lovely, cluttered, wee place down in Leith”, and how, at times both poet and artist thought “it was lunatic, what we were doing”.  In a Q&A session she revealed that her most problematic poem took her 18 months to complete; her role as professor of poetry at the University of Stirling keeps her in touch with young writers, and her family from poverty;  and she will be treating herself to a trip to Tanzania in October to see some birds and animals. Jamie concluded with the poem Bannockburn, a commission that will be carved around an oak beam , to mark the highly-charged 700th anniversary of the battle next year. She emphasised that she did not want it to be nationalistic or victorious, but about the land. Its final lines: “Come all ye,’ the country says. / ‘You win me, who take me most to heart.’

 

THE weather has generally looked kindly on Edinburgh so far this summer. One book festivalgoer queuing for a poetry event recalled previous years and how the sound of the rain beating on the canvas tents often drowned out the speakers. As l listened to anthology editor Nathan Hamilton reading a series of lengthy, episodic extracts from his introduction to Bloodaxe's Dear World & Everyone In It while three poets awaited thier chance to read I must confess to praying for rain.

 

FORMER Edinburgh slam champion Cat Brogan found herself apologising on Monday for having to read some of her poems at Other Voices: Spoken Word Cabaret at the Banshee Labyrinth.  “I’m doing an MA at Goldsmiths and as a result I’m not allowed to rhyme anymore,” she explained.  As any performance poet will tell you, it’s the rhyme and beat that help you remember the words.

 

THE Banshee Labyrinth is home to a number of events in the PBH Free Fringe part of the festival. Labyrinth is right: the series of cellar-like performing spaces resemble catacombs. I have no idea whether this is true, but MC Fay Roberts, in a resplendent outfit, informed the Spoken Word Cabaret audience that the shadowy cave we were occupying was once a torture chamber. Fay's event, featuring a host of female spoken word names daily except Wednesdays, at 2.50pm, included on Monday Jess Green, Stephanie Dogfoot, and Danni Antagonist, in addition to special guest Cat Brogan.    

 

AS I’ve already made clear, it’s 10 years since I was last at the Edinburgh Fringe, and there have certainly been some changes in that time. For one thing, Fosters and Strongbow now seem to be on tap everywhere, almost to the exclusion of any other choice. Progress comes in many shapes, I guess. 

 

ONE thing you will be told about Edinburgh is that you keep bumping into people unexpectedly, until eventually it becomes expected. At the Banshee Labyrinth I encountered an ex-colleague from my former days as a newspaper sub-editor.  I had no idea he went in for this kind of thing. Andy Bodle was in Edinburgh as part of the group Stand-Up Tragedy, and looked in on the Spoken Word Cabaret on Monday to deliver an open mic offering called Cometh the Hour, about losing your virginity to the wrong person, and of years spent with his “flag at full-mast”, which he sang impressively as a sea shanty. You dark horse,  Andy. Greg Freeman  

 

◄ Dim the lights, bedeck in red: female poets illuminate the Labyrinth

Phill Jupitus the poet? Worth a listen. But don't give up the day job, Phill ►

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