Although there are two “Suites”, of five and eight sections respectively, and a page-length prose poem (“West-Coast Colloquy”), the keynote of this volume is minimalism: short free-verse lyrics, many with short lines. It’s a common form in post-1960s poetry; one which hopes to imbue language with intensity through terseness, and invite us to focus on Read More
Nominated for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize in 2011, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions restores complexity, colour and light to a world which had turned fifty shades of grey. Jacqueline Saphra writes with disarming honesty about sex, control, femininity, gender roles and relationships. Above all, these are intensely personal poems. The first section on childhood Read More
Canadian director Guy Madden has described Keyhole as his most narrative-driven film to date. In spite of this claim, the film frequently dispenses with the sort of narrative conventions that allow a plot to be followed easily by any audience. It is a film that combines seemingly disparate elements such as American gangster films, Greek Read More
A young child goes missing. This is a headline that has appeared all too often in recent times and rarely with a happy ending. Cinema goers might have such a caveat in mind when they sit down to watch Bart Layton’s The Imposter. The film documents the true story of serial confidence trickster Frédéric “The Read More
Following the overwhelming success of Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning film A Separation in 2011, an earlier and much more quiet Farhadi film, About Elly, has now gained a UK release; and I am personally thrilled that it has. The plot revolves around a group of middle-class friends who reunite on a beach holiday which Sepideh (Golshifteh Read More
Diana McCaulay’s new novel, Huracan, tells the story of her Jamaican homeland through three separate narratives, two of them historical and the third set – more or less – in the present day. The primary narrative is that of Leigh McCaulay, who returns to modern day Jamaica after the death of her mother. Alienated as Read More
Families and familial relations are where feelings such as love, desire, anger, hurt, anguish, betrayal, guilt, frustration not infrequently reach a tipping point. The bonds that bind parents, children, siblings are so overdetermined that it often becomes impossible to think and see clearly, and even more so when their circumstances are infused with tragedy. Family Read More
Given that it boasts a chic, Glenlivet-supping heroine ostensibly named after one of the architects of the post-war British welfare state, it is not surprising that Sara Sheridan’s Brighton Belle is difficult to pin down in any satisfactory way. Sheridan’s new period mystery, the first of the Mirabelle Bevan series, demonstrates that the boundaries between Read More
What is a story? The question broadly resembles parallel queries in the arts and sciences. In Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider recently glimpsed a particle which, expressing a certain field, provides a quality called mass to other, fundamental particles. At Liverpool Tate, you can currently see work by Turner, Monet and Twombly; and can wonder Read More
