W.S. GRAHAM: OUT OF HIS HEAD. To 26 August.
Edinburgh 2007 Fringe.
W. S. GRAHAM: OUT OF HIS HEAD
by Kenneth Price.
Underbelly, 56 Cowgate To 26 August 2007.
Everyday. 1.30pm.
Runs 1hr. No interval.
TICKETS. 0870 745 3083 or Fringe BO 0131 226 0000.
Review Thelma Good 14 August 2007.
Gentle play.
In front of us some sand, a few chairs, a washed up lemon, a simple cupboard with enamel ewer and basin and a man in striped winceyette pyjamas. “Can you hear my voice as well as my poems?” he asks. The man is Kenneth Price’s W. S. Graham, a Greenock-born poet who spent nearly all his adult life in Cornwall in poverty writing the most exquisite poems, where words sing and grammar stretches and hums around them.
Price has a wonderful voice, which adds soft dying cadences to the lines, like listening to a close Scottish cousin of Dylan Thomas. Graham’s poems should be better known. He had an extraordinary ear for how meaning could be carried between the words and within their music, for his poems frequently convey meanings that cannot be put into words. As he said in his 1966 Malcolm Mooney’s Land, “Have I not been trying to use the obstacle of language well?”
Price’s gentle play starts near Graham’s end in 1986, journeying back to his beginning in 1918. It goes quickly through his years in Scotland and his meeting with Nettie Dunsmuir at Newbattle Abbey near Edinburgh, where they both were studying. Then he went to live in a caravan where Nettie, also a noteworthy poet, joined him for a very simple life living on patrons, a small pension and uncertainty. He had many friends and was well-loved.
Drawing on his letters and poems we get some impression of his life, but it seems it’s not a life of drama or of outrageous behaviour like Thomas’s. Price also side-steps the opportunity to explore the labour of making such sublime lines, for Graham worked long and hard at his craft. The result is a vivid snapshot of the man rather than an imaginative portrayal of his rich complexity.
W. S. Graham : Kenneth Price.
2007-08-17 02:39:56