Each festival focuses on two themes which weave around each other to give every StAnza its own unique flavour.

Our first theme for 2011 is Timepiece. Taking as a starting point the vibrant and significant history of Scotland, in 2011 StAnza will engage with the dynamic between verse and the recorded and unrecorded past, seminal moments from poetry and the daily routine of nations and communities, those local and those distant in space and time, as well as individual family histories. As part of this, in the 100th anniversary year of the birth of the great Scottish Gaelic poet Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley MacLean), we will have a focus on Gaelic and present events to mark that occasion, including a special musical performance in partnership with The Sorley Maclean Trust, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Music Centre at St Andrews University.

Our second theme, The Poets’ Ark, will set loose around St Andrews a whole menagerie of animal poems, looking at the substantial contribution of our fellow creatures to poetry past and present. We shall consider how in their work poets set about capturing our complex relationship with nature, exploring the tensions between wilderness and captivity, extinction and survival.

See our website www.stanzapoetry.org for more information.