Heed a Word to the wise

IMAGINATION, Baudelaire once said, is really just a matter of establishing the secret links between things.

That shot’s there at the end of his powerful film about an irreparably damaged childhood, overlaid with the sound of the Apollo 15 astronauts chattering away to Houston. All at once the moon is transformed: it’s no longer distant, but almost reachable. In his story of human depravity set in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, MacLaverty needs a symbol of how far all that is from what man is capable of. So that daytime moon comes into shot, overlaid with astronauts’ techno-talk, making the point perfectly.

After the film, MacLaverty read to a hushed auditorium the poem by Seamus Heaney on which it was based. It has haunted his mind for decades. And if you want more secret links, they’re webbed all over between the poem and the film, in what was possibly the starkest reminder of poetry’s condensed power.

True, there was a lot of competition in Aberdeen last weekend. Festival director Alan Spence’s own haikus, distilling moments of seasonal change, came close. John Burnside’s poems inspired by paintings, real or imagined, have the same soft grace. Robin Robertson read poems whose diamond-drilled descriptive precision ("the sound of coals unwrapping themselves like sweets") are matched by huge emotional depth.

Not all such experiments in opening up the Word festival beyond the written word itself succeeded. Jackie Kay’s poetry, especially the intensely personal poetry in her latest collection, Life Mask, already has such direct power that accompaniment by the Spontaniacs’ improvised jazz seems pointless. Lucy Kendra’s free-floating vocals only occasionally enhanced Kay’s own delivery, but perhaps that’s a fault of form not ambition: anyone improvising music to turn poetry into song in front of a live audience deserves medals for courage, but perhaps the more precise the poetry, the easier it is for such a project to fail.

Although inevitably nowhere near as widely international as its big brother festival in Edinburgh, Word does an excellent job in exploring both literature’s potential and different aspects of Scottishness.

On Saturday, for example, in a discussion on the 100 best Scottish books, Andrew O’Hagan made the case for John Galt’s Annals of the Parish with compelling eloquence. Galt, he said, deliberately set out to keep record the birth, in the 1830s, of a new kind of Scotland, saying goodbye to the old with the same kind of valedictory spirit Sunset Song showed a century later.

In that same hall just a day later, talking about the Lowland Clearances, Tom Devine could have used Galt to make the same point. Talking about the "mystery" of why the Lowland Clearances had been virtually forgotten, even though the scale of dispossession of land was far greater than in the Highlands, only at the end of his talk did he mention a couple of salient facts. For one thing, the cottars cleared from the land had jobs to go to and the wages they could get in doing so were higher. So what’s the mystery about the fact they took them?

Devine didn’t mention fiction at all, but there was plenty of traffic the other way, not least in an interesting session in which James Robertson and James Meek talked about writing fiction set in the past. Both agreed writing without the scaffolding of dates and places was harder - a conclusion Jennie Erdal agreed could apply to writing her own novel rather than being ghostwriter for someone else (in her case, the egregious publisher she calls Tiger but everyone else knows is really Naim Attallah).

My only regret is there’s a whole 12 months to get through before Word 06.