Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

The poet only insists on capturing the thought and the scene before them, any music that is laid down afterwards is not in their hands at the time when the image presents itself, when the feeling of absolute opens up before them and the setting in which they exist hears nothing but solitude and wonder.

In the same way that a poet can bring a kind of extension to a piece of music, so to does the musician have an obligation to take the words of the poet and bring them out of the self-imposed solitude and give them a deeper richness than might have been expected; even in a time when the poet has sharpened their last pencil and drawn a final line underneath a telling couplet, the musician is there to see that story continues.

For Campbelltown residents and musicians, Anne Leith and Les Oman, it is arguably with honour that they pay tribute to the work of the Tarbert poet George Campbell Hay and their own Angus Martin with a series of songs inspired by the two poet’s work. Poets is not just a passion in which to indulge, it is a commemoration which understands the often inequality that strides through a poem’s meaning and form and which for all the best will in the world cannot be replicated in other forms of art. It takes trust, measure and openness to attach a quality of persuasive notes that can be married in harmony to a poet’s musing and personal insight, and one that Anne Leith and Les Oman carry off with prestige.

To compliment the poet in such fashion is too show a soul that they have been cared for, the underrated in the artistic school that they also have a voice that can be appreciated beyond the spoken word delivered in smoke filled rooms and battling the engine like sound of a tea urn as it splutters into life; and in the pieces The Fisherman Speaks, The Old Fisherman, The Smoky Smirr o’ Rain, The Hird’s House, Dancers and The Tiller what transpires is reflection, of pushing a purity that many shy away from and giving it a wider audience, the marriage of folk and soul-baring poetry out into the open.

The six pieces of music are natural, almost entwined between solemnity and roaring passion and yet they are instinctive and hold fast to the ideal of the poet. Too many shy away from getting to grips with poetry, almost deriding the medium as serving only a reminder of what solitude can do for the mind, instead Poets offers something more, a tangible open hand in which to grasp and see the world through other’s eyes, a vision that can be heard beating.

Ian D. Hall