Arran Poetry – Export Strength

The poetry scene on Arran has been burgeoning in recent years. The McLellan Festival runs poetry workshops and a competition every year as part of the overall Festival, and a group of local poets meet regularly to discuss poetry and organise poetry events whenever possible. And now, poetry joins Arran’s other tasty exports such as whisky and chocolate, with three local poets scheduled to do a reading in Lancaster early in June.

David Underdown, Cicely Gill and Tim Pomeroy will be reading at the Storey Auditorium in Lancaster on the 5th June as guests of a writing group called April Poets, one of whose members, Ron Scowcroft, won a prize in the McLellan poetry competition last year. It is hoped that this initiative will stimulate further connection with other writers’ groups and lead to more exchanges.

Although island-dwelling, our poets’ subjects are far from insular. While they often refer to land and sea-scapes, their issues are wide-ranging, touching on personal and social relationships to the inscrutability of theology and the cosmos. In September some of the April Poets will come to Arran as part of the McLellan Festival.

David Underdown’s collection, Time Lines, was published in 2011 and he was shortlisted for two significant poetry prizes last year. Cicely Gill recently published a crime novel, Ivory, and Tim’s joint collection of 2007, Their Proper Names has sold out.

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