Simon Mundy’s fourth poetry collection, More for Helen of Troy, is, in many ways, a mixed bag. It ranges from vignettes of Helen of Troy in the opening ten-poem sequence to poems of landscape, personal incident and ideas. And it explores themes as varied as gender relations, war, ageing and ideals. Mundy brings a deftness Read More
The celebrated New York poet Jorie Graham has published numerous collections of verse, including Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, Erosion, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, Materialism, The Errancy, Swarm, and Never. Her first edition of selected poems, The Dream of the Unified Field, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996. A sequel to Read More
It’s not often that you hear an original new voice in writing, but Dickson Telfer’s debut collection of short stories seems to signal him as owning just such a voice. The stories have impressive imaginative power, depicting kaleidoscopic worlds seen from skewed angles through highly coloured prisms. There is great variation in his narrative style Read More
The spirit of Edwin Morgan is at large in Bill Herbert. But Herbert’s new double collection also belongs in the tradition initiated by Wordsworth’s Prelude, in that it exhibits the poetic mind contemplating itself. As in the great Romantic poem, which remained unfinished, there is a sense in which Herbert’s two books of specular poetry, Read More
Expectations are curious creatures; sometimes they are too weighty and hinder the book’s or film’s imaginative flight. I’ve always looked forward to an Ian McEwan novel. I loved his Austenite homage in Atonement, the reflective stock-taking in Saturday and the inventiveness of Amsterdam. In the main, I am deaf to accusations that he writes middle-brow Read More
Studio Ghibli is perhaps Japan’s best known animation studio with accolades and awards (including an Oscar) heaped upon Hayao Mayazaki and his team. I’m not ashamed to admit that I am a hardcore Ghibli fan, having seen most of their films (some even obsessively). Ghibli’s narratives use children or young adults as main characters who, Read More
Only God Forgives is a fascinating film. That being said, it is definitely not for everybody. It takes some time to warm to director Nicolas Winding Refn’s style but once you have adjusted to the disorientating cinematography, it is incredibly intense and moving. Central to the plot are the emotional and psychological issues that Julian Read More
Inspired by an incident at SeaWorld Orlando in which an Orca Whale attacked and killed its trainer, Blackfish originated from director Gabriella Copperthwaite’s desire to understand what might cause a highly intelligent animal to “bite the hand that feeds”. The result is a fascinating and tragic documentary that explores the intimate yet uneasy relationship between Read More
Alienation seems to be the prevailing theme throughout director Edgar Wright’s Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy. After the everyman saviour of the world in Shaun of the Dead (2004) (the “Strawberry” Cornetto) and the exceptional cop thrown into a village of corruption represented in Hot Fuzz (2007) (the “Original” blue), Wright and co-writer Simon Pegg tackle Read More
Cal McGill is back. The sea detective, introduced in the eponymous novel of 2011, gets involved in a second adventure that brings together old and new family models, suppressed secrets, unrequited love and the mysteries of the ocean. In a crowded market, authors of crime or mystery fiction have to try ever harder to make Read More