For those familiar with director Andrew Dominik and Brad Pitt’s last collaboration, 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly may surprise. Whilst the former revels in the beauty of its location, the latter ratchets up the violence, so much so that any beauty present is mixed with sheer Read More
Anne Stevenson’s sixteenth collection, Astonishment, examines the everyday in an extraordinary way. Love, nature, childhood and old age are put through her alembic of lyrical compression and technical inventiveness. The opening poem, “The Loom”, marks the beginning of life itself: “ And once my lungs were gills”. The image of the loom shapes both the Read More
It has always been difficult to give an adequate definition of the Modernist movement in literature that does justice to its complexities. What we can be certain of is Modernism’s complete departure from tradition. In Umbrella, which could be described as Will Self’s most experimental piece of work to date, the reader is without a Read More
Directed by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr and co-directed by his wife, Ágnes Hranitzky, The Turin Horse stands triumphantly alongside Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), two of his films widely regarded as cinematic masterpieces. Although Tarr and László Krasznahorkai (his long-time screenwriter) discussed the idea for The Turin Horse around 1990, its production was postponed Read More
Swimming Home, Deborah Levy’s first novel for fifteen years, is a slim volume which has the outward appearance of a novella rather than a novel. This, coupled with what seems to be a somewhat conventional storyline of marital infidelity in a holiday villa in the south of France, makes Levy’s book, at first sight, an Read More
Mortality is, of course, a regular concern of poets. How much more pressing might be the need to explore our relationship with death if the poet were born Jewish in 1942? How much weightier yet might that feeling be were he to have sprung from “a long line of rabbis”, and his father, by his Read More
The introduction to The Queen of Versailles comprises a collage of pictures and interviews, and these opening scenes establish the tone of Lauren Greenfield’s documentary. Two main players of the piece are introduced: David Siegel is the king of Westgate, the largest and most lucrative timeshare company in the world; Jackie Siegel is his estranged Read More
Street poetry, as an art form, is certainly nothing new. “Auld Reekie’s” Robert Fergusson was the pioneer of pavement verse and, since then, the trend has developed into the wonderful localised material heard and read today. Gary Robertson is Dundee born and bred, granting him the authority and the credentials to comment (often acerbically) on Read More
Bashabi Fraser
Douglas Dunn, quoted on the front cover of The Magicians of Edinburgh, describes Ron Butlin, in the inevitable cliché, as “the best, the most productive Scottish poet of his generation”. On the back cover, Sorley Maclean calls Butlin’s poems those “of a man who can think and feel”, adding that “poems come [to Butlin] because Read More