The ninth edition of the Punto de Vista collection will be dedicated to the film poems and essays written by Margaret Tait

The Scottish poet and filmmaker, Margaret Tait, will be the focus of the ninth edition of the Punto de Vista collection with a volume that includes seven cinematographic essays and 32 poems translated from English for the first time, and previously published in the book Poems, Stories and Writings (ed. Carcanet Press, 2012). The book entitled Hen Means Honey. Chose film poems and essays about cinema by Margaret Tait presents a selection of all her collections of poems and also adds her writings on film with reflections on cinematographic time, the works of Rossellini or her ideas on independent and low budget film. 

Tait was the author of three collections of poems: Origins and Elements (1959), Subjects and Sequences (1960) and The Hen and the Bees (1960), all of which were self-published, of which very few copies were printed. Along with this volume, Punto de Vista 2015 will also dedicate an extensive retrospective to Tait’s films, which will reveal that poetry and film are inseparable and undistinguishable in her work. The exhibition, made up of three programmes (Portraits, Landscapes and Poems), will include a session in which Tait’s short films will be accompanied by the reading of various poems by the author herself. From her beginnings in film, Tait worked as a poet behind the camera, brandishing it as if it were a feather, “stalking the image”, as she liked to say, referring to the prose by Federico García Lorca. 

In the words of the filmmaker and commissioner, Peter Todd, author of one of the articles included in the book, “both in these poems and in Tait’s films and cinema, there is a kind of immersion in image and sound around something specific, a person, a place or even a feeling”. Along with him, Sarah Neely, author of various publications on Tait’s films and member of Stirling University, also offers the volume a beautiful approximation to the similarities that can be found between the filmmaker’s poetry and films.  Sarah Neely will also be responsible for presenting the film sessions devoted to Tait in Pamplona.

The essayist and poet, Antonio Rivero Taravillo, translator of the poetic works by Ezra Pound, John Keats, William Shakespeare, Robert Graves, John Donne or Walt Whitman, has been responsible for the translation of the poems, which, until now, had only existed in their English version.