Maurice Riordan’s fourth collection is one of deceptive complexity. Read in isolation, individual poems such as “The Noughties” may seem overly brief or inconsequentially anecdotal, but this is a collection which must be read as an organised whole. Clear thematic threads are formed around ideas of modernity, technology, memory and personal loss, but these strands Read More
The Darkest Dreams exhibition is situated in the Lamb Gallery on the first floor of Dundee University Tower Building. It features works from a variety of artists gathered together by Dundee University Fine Art Collection. The artworks on display date from around the 1960s’ to more contemporary times and include contributions from Dundee University graduates, Read More
1939 was an excellent vintage for Northern Irish poetry as both Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley were born in that year. Indeed, in some sense, their verse is not dissimilar in that it is never pretentious, and there is much to be said in favour of poetry that somehow manages to imbue everyday occurrences with Read More
Moniza Alvi’s latest collection, At the Time of Partition, frames a narrative of what “might have taken place” at the time of the partition of India and Pakistan. The poems, detailing the movement of her father’s family from Ludhiana to Lahore in the newly formed Pakistan, combine to produce an overarching tale of political failure Read More
An Orwellian dystopia that is the city of Manchester in 2018 draws readers into a fascinating world created by Matt Hill in his novel The Folded Man. The parallels are easy to draw and features within this world are instantly familiar. Hill creates a world which has been all but destroyed, a world which seems Read More
The cover of Helen Mort’s debut collection consists of a photograph of a miner confronting policemen during the 1984 Strike; Division Street promises a work “marked by distance and division”, “[f]rom the clash between striking miners and police to the delicate conflicts in personal relationships”. The title itself announces this. Outwardly then, the book indicates Read More
Robin Robertson’s newest collection Hill of Doors was a book I wanted to review, such was the praise heaped upon it; nominations for the T.S. Eliot prize and the Costa book award only enhanced its literary reputation. The landscape of Robertson’s poetry is fascinating. Variegated cultural strains – history, legend, myth, past and present, contribute Read More
Canadian poet and classicist, Anne Carson, has followed up The Autobiography of Red with this stunning “sequel”, Red Doc>. G, the central character, a winged being and herdsman like his mythical namesake, Geryon, is on a road trip with artist, Ida (who looks like a “tough experimental baby”), and his former lover, Herakles, now in Read More
Having read nothing beyond the most basic plot synopsis for Don Jon, I was not expecting much from this screening. I assumed “Jersey-Shore style ladies’ man and porn connoisseur finds love with woman who expects him to change his lifestyle” was going to be a puerile comedy running entirely on sex jokes and cleavage shots. Read More
After spending 6 months researching in Glasgow, Pedro Lenz releases his debut Swiss-German novel Der Goalie bin Ig. What’s special about this book? It is written entirely in the vernacular Swiss-German ‘Mundart’. What’s even more special is that Donal McLaughlin has painstakingly translated the work into a thick, west –Scottish dialect and released the novel Read More