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
Renfrewshire-born Kathleen Jamie, Scotland’s sole Eliot prize nominee, has long been resident on the Fife shore of the Tay. The Overhaul bears the watermarks of her adopted home. Jamie’s collection begins with “The Beach”, human rubbish seen as man’s contribution to natural beauty, and comes full circle with the span of “bird-bones, rope-scraps” in the Read More
Since Robert Mapplethorpe emerged in the 1970s his work has been regarded as synonymous with controversy. The artist’s explicit critique of societal norms and the unconventional beauty of some of his photographs have augmented this controversial reputation. Having been regarded as a pioneer of artistic explorations of sexuality and gender, we find Mapplethorpe continuously cited Read More
The National Poet of Wales since 2008, Gillian Clarke is a writer, lecturer, translator and champion of the Welsh language; in 2010 she received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Having published ten collections since 1971, Clarke is a prolific poet and a central figure in Welsh literary life. The snowbound winters of 2009 and Read More
After the fairly tepid responses to his work between Festen (1998) and Submarino (2010, Thomas Vinterberg returns to his thematic roots in The Hunt, once again examining the idea of child abuse in a close-knit social sphere. Ex-teacher Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) is working in a nursery whilst negotiating custody of his teenage son Markus (Losse Read More
“Dripping in Gothic tension”, the endorsement by Doug Johnstone on the cover of The Healing of Luther Grove, is an pretty accurate summation of the book. Barry Gornell’s debut novel, funded with the aid of the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Bursary, contains all the elements of a traditional horror. Right from the first sentence, Read More