Cuirt lives up to tradition

A special festival, which has inspired imitations in other parts of the world, is how American poet and former soldier Brian Turner described the Cúirt Festival of Literature as he formally opened the event on Tuesday at Galway City Museum.“As an outsider, I can see that Cúirt is a special festival and it would be easy to lose sight of that after 23years. But don’t,” advised the writer who was on a return trip to Galway, having read at last year’s festival.Wearing an Aran jumper he had bought in Galway that day, he spoke of Cúirt fitting into a long tradition of story-telling “an age old practice of bearing witness to history and trying to explain the human condition”.When Turner served in Iraq from 2002-2004, he was sent there with the usual soldier’s kit, but he also brought several books including an anthology Iraqi Poetry Today and an English translation of the Koran.These helped to give him an............