City of Departures represents departures from home, touching down in a number of European cities, but it also represents a departure from reality, diving deep into an uncanny, dream landscape. That landscape is urban, but it is not to be found in the busy carriageways and shopping centres, nor the packed pubs and restaurants and travel Read More
Isabel Galleymore’s first full collection begins with an epigraph from Donna Haraway drawing attention to a planetary ecology where different species share developmental trajectories and living spaces; these are ‘companion species’ that are nevertheless distinct and irreducible one to another. The challenge in Significant Other is to avow species strangeness without estrangement. Not to exoticize Read More
Certain kinds of children’s stories have long promised that anything is possible at night when the rest of the world is asleep. So there is a certain magic in just the conceit behind the title of Niall Campbell’s Forward Prize shortlisted second collection. A ‘noctuary’, we are told, is ‘a diary for the late hours’ Read More
The Glass Aisle enfolds the reader with intricacies and figures of sound, exploring noise, rhythm and also silence within its pages. Addressing time, loss and childhood memories ─ told through the stories of ordinary people ─ the collection’s musicality and its preoccupation with voices make for its signature sonic tapestry. This is the tenth book of poetry from Read More
Carys Davies has been honing her short form craft for many years, with two collections of short stories to her name and a slew of impressive writing credits that include the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize. It should be no surprise then that her Read More
Capturing the experiences of womanhood with currency for our time may require an acknowledgement of contrast, notably between the furiously public domain of the #metoo campaign and its associated high-profile sexual assault cases, and the hidden realities of motherhood and female domesticity. Fiona Benson’s second collection of poetry, Vertigo & Ghost, delivers a duality that Read More
Have you noticed Dundee audiences love to laugh? The Rep Ensemble’s second offering in their twentieth anniversary production line-up caters perfectly to this characteristic. A-Z of Dundee is a brilliant evening of tales, jests, history, and even a quiz, during which there are plenty of opportunities to giggle, chortle, chuckle, and guffaw. Opening with an Read More
Deaf Republic begins with a gunshot. As an innocent deaf boy falls to the ground, the townspeople choose silence over the sound of a child’s body hitting the street, a sound that would be filled with pain and injustice: ‘The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water’. The rest of the Read More
Sunshine streams in through the huge windows of Perth Concert Hall where Clare Hunter and I meet to talk about her book, Threads of Life, a History of the World through the Eye of a Needle. Recently published, this is a history of the social impact and political meaning of textiles. Armed with coffee and Read More
Do you ever read the last page of a book first? I don’t know why I did with this book, because I wouldn’t usually. Yet I am so glad I did. I know nothing about needlework but this is how the final paragraph begins, ‘Sewing is a way to mark our existence on cloth: patterning Read More