The Book of Strange New Things

“Do not judge a book by its cover” would be a highly useful warning for the potential reader, who might be put off by the extreme vagueness of the title. Any concern that the content of the novel might be some kind of abstract, pseudo-existential pretentiousness is absolutely ungrounded. On the contrary, the eponymous Book Read More

Lilting

Harold Pinter once remarked that silences were revelatory spaces “below the word spoken”. The last essay in Kei Miller’s Writing Down the Vision, “A space between the poems” turns on the word “space”; Miller’s incantatory repetition of the word, turning it around this way and that to pick up nuances of meaning, crafts a perfect Read More

Fold of the Map

Joseph P. Wood’s Fold of the Map has a consistency of voice which is at once brutal and reflective, encouraging a range of open associations through a style which can only be described as consistently fragmentary. At times, especially when the poems are read aloud, the speaker flits between a sensory bombardment with descriptions of Read More

Voices of the Benares

 On September 13th, 1940, the Ellerman Line ship “the S.S. City of Benares’”set sail from Liverpool for Canada. Among the passengers on board were 90 evacuee children. Late in the evening, on September 17th, the ship was sighted by a German U-boat, which fired two torpedoes. The torpedoes missed, but just after midnight, a third Read More

Notes for Lighting a Fire

If one were to look for extensive fire metaphors in Notes for Lighting a Fire, one would most likely be disappointed. Gerry Cambridge’s first poetry collection in eight years is not so much interested in fire itself, but rather what its origins are, what effects it has, and perhaps most importantly, the consequences of its Read More

The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Man Booker Prize Winner 2014)

Richard Flanagan’s novel is written in tribute to his father who survived the horrors of working on the Thailand to Burma railway. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is largely written through the perspective of an Australian surgeon called Dorrigo Evans; it comprises three main arenas, each with its own distinct emotional and physical Read More

The Wake (Man Booker Longlist 2014)

Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake’s inclusion in the Booker longlist should come as no surprise, given Hilary Mantel’s successes with English historical fiction and recent popular interest in the Anglo-Saxon period. JRR Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf was published earlier this summer. Yet, The Wake is neither a translation of Old English nor a conventional historical novel. Read More

History of the Rain (Man Booker Longlist 2014)

“We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.” Sequestered in an attic room in her ramshackle family home in County Clare, Ireland, separated from the outside world by a debilitating medical condition, ‘plain Ruth Swain’ has only the constant rain and a Read More