Poetry Encounters

Encounters is a performance from four poets living in / originating from the Highlands Cit ONeill McCullagh (Easter Ross) Leonie Charlton (Argyll) Andy Breckenridge (Oban) and Jon Miller (Ullapool) all working in collaboration with Argyll musician / clarsair, Bragha Charlton. In a performance between voices, across languages and dialects, and rippled with tunes; both traditional and original the poets will perform selections of their own works. Each engages with, interprets, and explores the possibilities suggested by the idea of encountering, including the joys, tensions, conflicts and surprises aroused by chance meetings and experiences. Cit, Andy, Jon and Leonie will share poems founded in everyday living encounters met through regular routines and sometimes extraordinary journeys; with friends, neighbours, lovers, and colleagues. They will also venture into more expansive territory, sharing poems of encounter as a lens for exploring contemporary and urgent themes, including poems of encounter that inform and challenge ideas of identity, welcome, prejudice, and belonging, and offering a Highland poetics for exploring the clashes and debates around ecological challenges. Through thoughtful noticing and humorous observations, captured in poems that share lived experiences of the everyday and the surreal, and through music, silence, and celebration, Encounters will invite The Rockfield Centre audience to experience their own transformative encounter with the possibilities shared in the performance. It will be a Ceilidh of the Moment.