GHOSTS AT PLAY
CatStrand, New Galloway, DG7 3RN
Saturday 22nd August 2026
In poetry and music – from Japan to Glenkens – Tom Pow and Jo Miller present a conversation around ‘Hallowed ground’.
Many of the poems in Tom Pow’s Ghosts at Play – Poems from Rural Japan found their way into his play Towa Mura. Towa Mura is an imagined village, but in many ways a representative one. In debating its future – whether to sell itself for landfill or to continue its decline, it is as important for Towa Mura to respect and to honour its past as its present. In this way, in the course of the play, as in the poems, exchanges of memory, of emotion and of knowledge take place.
Music, in Towa Mura, is also a powerful way of bringing to life people and places from the past. It too can be a valuable record of experiences and emotions often not represented in 'official' documents. In the Glenkens, Jo Miller has found that traditional songs are rich in details of the land, the people who have worked it and the life of the community. They also express more universal themes of belonging and identity. What are these songs, what does it mean to sing them in the present, and what are the new songs which voice the hopes and concerns of local communities today?
Tom Pow and Jo Miller explore Notes from the Land, from Japan to the Glenkens, in an hour of poetry and song.
Note
The geographer Marcus Doel contrasts ‘hollowed ground’ and ‘hallowed ground’. ‘Hollowed ground has been drained of meaning by violence and history; hallowed ground is filled with meaning that has been infused by tradition, ritual, tales, legends and agreed memories.’
Many of the poems in Tom Pow’s Ghosts at Play – Poems from Rural Japan found their way into his play Towa Mura. Towa Mura is an imagined village, but in many ways a representative one. In debating its future – whether to sell itself for landfill or to continue its decline, it is as important for Towa Mura to respect and to honour its past as its present. In this way, in the course of the play, as in the poems, exchanges of memory, of emotion and of knowledge take place.
Music, in Towa Mura, is also a powerful way of bringing to life people and places from the past. It too can be a valuable record of experiences and emotions often not represented in 'official' documents. In the Glenkens, Jo Miller has found that traditional songs are rich in details of the land, the people who have worked it and the life of the community. They also express more universal themes of belonging and identity. What are these songs, what does it mean to sing them in the present, and what are the new songs which voice the hopes and concerns of local communities today?
Tom Pow and Jo Miller explore Notes from the Land, from Japan to the Glenkens, in an hour of poetry and song.
Note
The geographer Marcus Doel contrasts ‘hollowed ground’ and ‘hallowed ground’. ‘Hollowed ground has been drained of meaning by violence and history; hallowed ground is filled with meaning that has been infused by tradition, ritual, tales, legends and agreed memories.’
