Island Brooding - Grace Nichols, David Constantine & Fleur Adcock At The ILF

The spectral presence of a lit, hanging globe at either side of the stage at the Ilkley Playhouse on Friday night seemed, at first sight, to be a distraction. But on closer inspection, Alison Smith's installation embodied a multi-layered dissection of what it means to be a consumer in a globalised world.

Entitled 'The Indestructible Reef', the globes have a counter-intuitive organic feel which softens ocular reception, and gives the illusion of soft pulsations and fragility.

That they are made entirely of discarded plastic tips a wink to the clogging of the oceans by drifting islands of this indestructible man-made material.

Suspended as though in water, and bleached white like the undermined corals of the Great Barrier Reef, the crushing irony of our limitless proclivity for ecological destruction was fully illuminated.

Daljit Nagra, the Ilkley Literature Festival's (ILF) Poet in Residence and a leading poet in his own right, hit the literary jackpot when he acquired the services of Fleur Adcock, David Constantine and Grace Nichols for Friday night's reading which was based loosely on the notion of 'Islands'.

All three are 'household' names in the rarified atmosphere of world poetry, and all gave a unique, if tangential, interpretation of what islands may mean to the deracinated, to the dispossessed and to immigrants.

In the dark of the Playhouse, Smith's 'corals' resembled stars in an empty universe, and it was a prescient coincidence that Grace Nichols should read her poem 'Mooncalf' in their light.

A paean to her lifelong obsession with gazing at the moon - the sky over her native Guyana is mostly clear - the poem gave an animated rendering of the power of the satellite to fascinate, to give comfort and to fire the metaphorical imagination: the moon is a marooned island in a tangential sense.

The poet's timbre, pace and Caribbean inflexion are suited to the performance of poems of collective memory and myth. In 'Hurricane hits England', Nichols successfully conveyed the clobbering of the south coast of England (where she lives) by a hurricane in 1987.

The storm - originating in the West Indian islands, the poet's intuitive birthplace - brought with it the wrath of the gods of Afro-Caribbean legend, a reminder, for Nichols, of a home where hurricanes are common, and towards which the pain of generational deracination is directed.

Fleur Adcock is a poet of human relationships and of emotional inference; at first sight, perhaps unsuited to the demands of a subject which encourages flights of Illyrian fancy. And although her reading was prosaic - a disquisition from new volumes about her ancestors - we saw, as the words emerged, how the observation of minutiae may shape an etranger's sense of dislocation and of belonging.

Adcock is a New Zealander by birth and a resident of the UK by choice, emergent from a family who first moved to Auckland in 1914, thereby fortuitously missing the outbreak of the Great War. Her own geographical wanderings since her first lengthy stay in the UK in 1939 have been pragmatic and propitious - following work and/or the imperatives of child-rearing - but never in exile qua permanence.

She is a woman of several island heritages, including Kiwi, English and Irish, and each cultural inheritance was played out in a performance of unusual tentativeness, as though, surveying the uncertain provenance of 'becoming', she felt the need to fill the air with locators - of lives and time-distanced cultural appurtenances.

Reading from her volumes 'Hoard' and 'The Land Ballot' amongst others, the audience was afforded a sense of the nature of rootlessness and of clinging to a past which is distorted through memory, and mostly out of reach. It is to Adcock's credit that the Irish potato famine, and the land grabbing of early twentieth century New Zealand looked remarkably clear under her microscope of local detail.

'Rootless' is not a term that could readily be ascribed to David Constantine, although there is irony in the sense of detachment and obliquity which pervades his poetry: what, at first glance, looks like emotional distance is nuanced observation of human behaviour finally yielding to real emotional engagement, and at times amounting to sincere love.

All a Poet can do

Constantine, born in Salford, and like many other writers, '(en)islanded' to the degree that his poetics is one of introspection and of looking outwards from a position of seeming isolation. He is a poet, often, of indirect engagement: perhaps taking a view of the context of our lives through the prism of the Classical world. But personal vision and experience dictate the direction of many of his poems.

By way of a thematic concession, Constantine's much-visited bolthole on the tiny Scilly Isle of Bryher became one of the focal points for this evening's reading. Bryher was the home of his father-in-law and the island has become the inspiration for several of his more recent poems.

Alongside the wittily repetitive and genuinely funny 'Tilley Hat', a long poem about a hat washed up by the Atlantic and its imagined provenance, Constantine gave a reading of a profoundly moving elegy for a lost friend. Like Wordsworth's 'Michael', the poet's subject is almost an archetype, as soaked in the sea and the island as to render man and landscape indivisible.

Constantine's gravitas and clarity of diction reinforced the sense of loss whilst re-inscribing the purlieus of this remote island, and its inhabitants, in the sands of memory.

Which is all, in the end, a poet can do.