Find as far inland as Kintyre can allow, map back to an almost-anywhere dot. Out of seasight. Still, on clouded nights, watch Rathlin’s lit pattern censer past. A little industrial structure. One bog-footed cave built for burning. All rabbit shit, trotting-in lost sheep, broken curves open to host brackening rain. A dripped-on Alice, shrunk on Read More
Patron Saint of Disappointing Children Praise to this book, now heavy with scurf, pages moist with the persistence of must, your words still breathing, though only just on the bowed shelves of the house of your birth. Praise to the dynasty of something and nothing, the house of which you one day will be head, Read More
On not straight-jacketing the essay form, creative failures, telling jokes etc.The renowned US essayist, Philip Lopate, interviewed by Paula Lyttle at the “Taking Ideas for a Walk” Essay conference for the University of Dundee Centre for Creative and Critical Cultures, Hospitalfield House, 19-20 June 2018.
Susan Nickalls, a freelance journalist and former student of the Writing Practice and Study programme at the University of Dundee, in conversation with the Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, on the design and building of the V&A Dundee. The interview was filmed at Discovery Point. DURA is grateful for the use of Discovery Point Premises. A Read More
“If we had a vision and a feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow […] and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” (George Eliot, Middlemarch.) The US Laureate, Tracy K. Smith, in her fourth collection of poetry, explores that “other Read More
At this year’s spring exhibition of Danh Voh’s photographs and sculptural installations of found and preserved objects at the Guggenheim in New York, I felt, viscerally, for the first time what had merely been an abstract idea: the rhythm of buildings, the poetry of objects, the stories that reside within, the narrative webs they are Read More
The intriguing title of Vahni Capildeo’s exquisite collection, Venus as a Bear, promises a kind of transformational prose, a mish-mash of animal and myth, of the ordinary and the extraordinary – and it surely delivers. A winner of the 2016 Forward Poetry Prize, Capildeo is undoubtedly a worthy contender for this year’s prize. Capildeo’s verse Read More
This year’s MFA students have turned the area around the Cooper Gallery into one of the most involved exhibition experiences I’ve ever seen. Josh Wilson’s Project ASaP is not only an excellent pun on the title of the course but involved me ‘asap’ in the gallery. I followed Wilson’s set of instructions to look through Read More
Kaveh Akbar’s poetry is captivating not only for its beautiful turn of phrases but also for its more profound musings in evocative lines that linger: “eternity looms/ in the corner like a home invader saying don’t mind me I’m just here to watch you nap”. Yet Calling a Wolf a Wolf isn’t simply a sum Read More
Abigail Parry’s debut collection Jinx is an exercise in sleight of hand, it’s a trick. Parry weaves the familiar elements of nursery rhymes and folktales with darker themes of sex, death and guilt into an uncomfortable combination that plays with readers’ expectations. She borrows characters and stories from those sharp-edged fairy tales with undercurrents of Read More