Sandra Ireland’s debut novel Beneath the Skin haunts you from the moment you first turn the opening pages. Echoes of former traumas are deeply embedded in the lives of fully realised, broken characters and ring in the reader’s ears from the first moments. In a time of clichéd explosions in soda adverts, or brutal, overt Read More
“It is cruel to expect me to be both mother and daughter – such different expectations.” Joanna Walsh’s new book Vertigo (a collection of short stories would be an equally apt description) offers a series of glimpses into the life of her protagonist. She is a mother. A child. A wife. A lover. Walsh portrays Read More
In this one-and-a-half-day international conference, hosted by the University of Dundee’s Centre for Critical and Creative Cultures, writers and teachers, academics, publishers and journalists will come together in a concentrated forum of panel discussions, readings and question-and-answer sessions that will explore the meaning and usefulness of this most supple, porous and open-ended literary form. Held Read More
Born in Cambridgeshire to American parents in 1933, Anne Stevenson has over sixteen published collections to date of predominantly lyrical works. Although her early adult years were spent in the United States where she graduated from the University of Michigan and published her first collection, Stevenson later returned to the U.K. to live permanently. She Read More
Ardent angler and Yorkshireman Chris McCully has followed a long and fruitful career in academia both at the University of Manchester and in the Netherlands. Born in Bradford in 1958, he now resides in Colchester where he researches English poetic form and metrics at the University of Essex and publishes in a range of genres Read More
Shadows dart throughout What The Wolf Heard; “skeletons” confirming the collection’s theme: their heads turn slightly in a synchronized intensification and lock on something just out of our vision. Daragh Breen’s poems are crowded with spirits and ghosts, their very ethereal nature characterizing his focus on the almost indefinable. Published in 2016, What The Wolf Read More
Roy Fisher’s latest collection, Slakki: New & Neglected Poems, epitomizes the poet’s struggle to stabilize his “everyday self — a quite presentable, penurious, and apparently unambitious young man” in his poetry. The process of putting together the collection addresses the creation of a poetic identity, the representation of Fisher the writer. Fisher’s collection is a Read More
If the purpose of a collection of short stories is to showcase the style and talent of the author, then The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim is an enormous success. All previously published in the New Yorker over the space of fifteen years, these stories offer a delicious coverage of the author’s Read More
One to hear One to remember And one to drink. The quietness of this little novel, The Noise of Time, is its weapon. Inside a jacket which shouts its title in blocky text and sings the author’s praises, a story is whispered covertly to the reader in snatches of non-linear narrative. This fictionalised biography of Read More
The subtitle for Robert Macfarlane’s Orphans is, intriguingly, “Poems borrowed by Martin Johnson.” The collection started life as a public challenge to writer Robert Macfarlane to “release the poetry that lay undiscovered in his prose.” When Macfarlane declined the task, Johnson took it on. The back cover offers a precedent for Johnson’s proposal: “Edward Thomas, Read More