Reviews

Not Drowning but Waving

Poems and songs on the theme of leaving and returning home

Wednesday 27 May 2009

Gordon Highlanders Museum, Aberdeen [Map]

What an achievement on the part of Gerard Rochford to have brought together so many talented people to perform for us in the lovely Gordon Highlanders Museum with moustachioed Gordon Highlanders looking down on us. I wonder what they would have made of it all. Certainly the theme of leaving and returning home would have been a familiar one to them but would they ever have explored it with the same depth and range of emotions?

Grace Banks, with a truly wonderful command of the subtle line of melody of an unaccompanied folk song, sang of the sadness of a young woman hoping against hope for the return of her exiled Jacobite lover. Sheila Templeton was both funny and poignant in her poem about her mother, after she'd just left home, sending her six eggs in the post. The sadness of a hundred Irish townlands made empty by the scourge of emigration in the 1950s came home to us in the powerful music of Brian Farrington's poem. Doirena Culloty in disarmingly simple and direct language read her poems about the difficulties of leaving home and settling in a foreign city — Aberdeen. Gerard Rochford, always careful and exact in his use of language, remembered his father's home leavings for boarding school and then for the army. Sixteen year old Bryony Harrower impressed us with her complex and thoughtful poems, especially the one about a butterfly's journey. And then we had the eerie song of the whale cunningly combined with Roddy Neilson on the fiddle accompanying Morag Skene in her plangent song of whalers bidding farewell to Tarwathie, and Brimmond and Mormond Hills, as they set out for Greenland. The evening ended with Roddy Neilson's stirring singing of Caledonia with the audience joining in the chorus — those of us who knew the words.

Olivia Farrington