Saturday, March 14, 2009

Report: Poetry at the Great Grog, March 2009

A belated report on last weekend’s readings at the Great Grog Bar! The four poets gave terrific performances, all very different from one another. Nalini Paul’s poems centred around landscape and travel – haunting, reflective and compelling material. Colin Donati’s are playful, musical, and nearly always hit the mark. He has an entirely distinctive voice. With Paula Jennings, you immediately know you’re listening to poetry. I really enjoyed the poems she’d ‘translated’ from languages she didn’t know, simply by guessing the words (of course, the resulting poems in English bore no relation to the originals’ meaning). Alexander Hutchison also exhibits playfulness, originality and musicality in his poems, and a highly inventive use of language. I’ve already mentioned his book, Scales Dog, many times on this blog – only because it’s so good.

So great stuff all round.

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