Bernadette Cremin is a British poet, performer and actor. Miming Silence is her third collection and this experience shows in the maturity of her writing. The poet knows what to say, when to hint or suggest, and where to stop and be silent. Divided into six sections of around ten poems, each part opens with Read More
With its star-studded cast, Tracy Lett’s adaptation of his own Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play, August: Osage County, directed by John Wells, can hardly fail to pull in the crowds. Of course, the family feuds, disintegrating marriages, adultery, and addictions which feature so strongly certainly help. Early on in the film, alcoholic poet Bev Weston (Sam Read More
After watching 12 Years a Slave, I felt the way I’d felt after visiting Auschwitz: raw and exposed, and gripped by a keen sadness. It induced in me something like a state of shock. A history long known and its facts long understood, but its implications for humanity suddenly made real. We all learn about Read More
Jeremy Reed is one of the most prolific poets currently working in Britain. He has published novels, poems, literary criticism and a number of translations. In other words, his work is not in short supply. Black Russian: Out-Takes from the Airmen’s Club, 1978-9 occupies, then, a curious space in his catalogue. The poems it contains Read More
Fred D’Aguiar’s The Rose of Toulouse is in many ways a highly eclectic text, with the poet not only flitting between free verse and more formally laid out pieces, but also managing to move seamlessly between themes. The blurb states, rather lazily, that this book is one of geographies; while that is certainly a dominant Read More
The Crumb Road may be Maitreyabandhu’s first book-length poetry collection, but he is by no means new to poetry having, for instance, already won the Keats-Shelley Prize. Born Ian Johnson, he converted to Buddhism in 1990 and his affinity with spirituality shows in his verse. The Crumb Road is for the main part concerned with Read More
Much like its predecessor, Peter Jackson’s latest film inevitably falls victim to the success of its forebears. No film deserves to be judged by such high standards, but Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy is trapped between the exceptional standards set by his previous Tolkien adaptations and the hallowed source material itself. Admittedly Jackson and his team have Read More
Director David O. Russell strikes again with another darkly comedic and original take on a genre film set to a zesty score by Danny Elfman. Loosely based on the F.B.I. ABSCAM operation in the 1970’s, the film centres on renamed con artists Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and his mistress Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) as they Read More
It’s a challenge for a novelist to engage readers with a novel that takes climate change as its central theme. Even this “non-denier” (climate change sceptic) was initially turned off by the prospect of doomsday polemic. I needn’t have worried. Kingsolver’s eighth novel displays all the subtlety, grace and balance of her previous work, regardless Read More
We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; Read More