In a Guardian Interview, Andrew Motion remarked, “Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.’” Motion’s new work, The Customs House, is a challenging post-laureate collection, strongly underscored with a melancholy that brings Read More
Bullhead is the 2012 Academy Award nominated film by Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam. His other works include Carlos (2004), winner of the Audience Award at Leuven International Short Film Festival, and Today is Friday (2007) an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short, one act play of the same title. Bullhead stars Matthias Schoenaerts as Jacky Read More
This interview with Sara Sheridan and Lin Anderson took place on 26 October 2012. Having recently completed my Ph.D. on contemporary Scottish crime fiction, and having written a review of Sheridan’s latest novel for DURA (https://www.dura-dundee.org.uk/Fiction/belle.html), I was delighted to have the opportunity to ask the two authors a few questions about perceptions of crime Read More
Quentin Tarantino is always a difficult filmmaker to critique. Since Kill Bill (2003), he has specialised in making a very distinctive brand of reference-filled, “Grindhouse” style, ultra-violent action films. Looking back on his early films, however, they seem in retrospect to be a bit more mature and thoughtful in comparison to his recent films. The Read More
Salman Rushdie is a prolific, accomplished and influential writer. Midnight’s Children won Rushdie the 1981 Booker Prize and was also voted the Best of the Bookers in 1993 and 2008 as part of the best of 40 and 75 years of the Booker Award respectively. Rushdie collaborated with Deepa Mehta to adapt Midnight’s Children for Read More
Poem 18 in this new collection by London-based poet Sam Riviere is called “Adversity in the Arts”; the second half reads: I’m told how nice it is to see that I T and E have their books out I’m sure they’ll receive excellent reviews in the broadsheets it’s no exaggeration to say that there are not enough minutes Read More
A “true story”. Signalling their poignancy, these two words linger on the screen after the rest of the opening blurb has faded. The Impossible is a curious popular cinematic trompe-l’oeil, designed to capture the tragedy of the real event, but necessarily predicated on knowledge of the real-life disaster in order to create the very cinematic Read More
Poets and their readers are sensitive people. A mere handful of days into an as yet undisturbed new year, Julia Copus hands us a collection with which to re-gauge these sensitivities. The World’s Two Smallest Humans is in two parts; the first focuses on time, perspective and relationships, and the second moves, slightly surprisingly, into Read More
In Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds re-visits the months, seasons and years following the moment her husband of thirty years tells her he is leaving her for another woman. Avoiding sentimentality and self-pity, she takes her readers to the core of her anguish, hurt and even shame. Intensely personal though they are, these poems nonetheless go beyond Read More
Jorie Graham’s twelfth collection of poetry, PLACE, short listed for the T S Eliot Prize and recent winner of the Forward Prize, offers the reader both meditation and protestation. An early poem, “Cagnes Sur Mer 1950”, set in the year of Graham’s birth, explores moments of consciousness, real or imagined, of her own infancy. From Read More