Filmpoem 12 / Prodigal

“Listening to a poem is not like reading a poem; there’s a sense of enlivening as a poem is launched into the air. Seamus Heaney, talking of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, noted that when he heard the whole thing read aloud the experience taught him, in the words of the poem, to sit still. This idea, the experience of being read to, allows the reader to be captive, open to the experience.  This is the essence of poetry-film.” (Alastair Cook)

Prodigal is a film of Kona Macphee’s poem. Kona’s poetry received an Eric Gregory Award in 1998 and was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for 2010. The film offered the chance for a commission for cellist Rebecca Rowe, part of the Composeher collective.

Rebecca performed the piece alongside a screening of the film at the Poetry Association of Scotland’s meeting in March 2011, at the Scottish Poetry Library. A new direction for the project perhaps, the addition of live performance…but the work is as dark and mercurial as ever.