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When thinking about narrative, we perhaps immediately associate this with longer forms (in the guise of the long-form poem as much as novels and plays). Yet what’s to say that the shorter form doesn’t offer equal narrative potential? This evening’s Centre Stage reading invites you to reflect upon these questions during readings from three of today’s leading poets. Robin Robertson, a poet arguably most renowned for his lyricism, will read from The Long Take, a long poem / novel in verse which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and draws more from the epic tradition and film noir than lyric. Emily Berry will join us on Zoom to read from her new collection Unexhausted Time, which could either be read as one long poem or a series of short fragments, in work that inhabits the half-light between real and imagined worlds, continuous time and isolated moments, and the individual and collective unconscious. Vahni Capildeo’s work restlessly shifts between long and short forms, in its quest for words adequate to whatever task(s) might be at hand. For Vahni, the land and water are alive with stories in our inhabitation of the diversity of deep time, if we might only listen. In their own words: ‘what appears fragmentary or dreamlike, complicated or upsetting, will embrace us in a kind of stillness, and begin to sing.’

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This event has been supported by EventScotland as part of Year of Stories 2022.