Intricately lyrical, Dai George’s second collection Karaoke King is infused with musicality and rhythm. Through styles ranging from reggae to calypso to jingles, this deft fusion of themes and contemplations explores concerns surrounding politics and climate change, and trepidation in approaching an increasingly digitalised world….
Eric Ngalle Charles’ work covers his life and experiences as an individual with an identity that has been pushed, and stretched over and around the world. As the blurb describes, his life is one of displacement and trafficking, being taken from his home in Cameroon to Russia, before finally settling in Wales, from where he now describes his story.
Old Boy offers an insight into Dundee’s boys and men, the history of familiar faces. Finn hasn’t even learned to walk, yet his grandfather Martin is here to share his story — just last year born but with so much ahead of him to learn. 10-year-old Harris has a special bond with his grandfather, David, talking about football, discussing the present, the future, and answering Harris’ hundreds of questions about David’s past, “What was life like when you were my age, granddad?”
Scottish Dance TheatreDundee Rep, 17-18 March Two pieces from the SDT’s new production are inspired by nature—imagining how we could be something else (a tree or a flock of birds). These create a shared space in a joyous & expansive act of poetic imagination. Pauline Torzuoli, the choreographer, has suggested seeing the piece as ‘a Read More
Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale is an intriguing encounter of the final moments one desolate soul, Charlie, makes on a path riddled with mistakes, a journey all of us know. Having abandoned his now 17-year-old daughter ten years ago, he is in search for redemption as a parent whilst battling with two major struggles—his declining health, as well as the guilt which lingers as a result of abandoning his family.
Adam Wyeth’s collection is poetic and dynamic, about:blank tentatively explores the nature of writing itself, and where it emerges from.
There is a stark, polarising beauty in Winter nights. The cold air makes the warmth shine all the brighter. Rhiannon Hooson’s Goliat follows this style of beauty and intrigue, illuminating its subjects through visual and lyrical contrast. The collection pulls the reader into a diverse array of striking landscapes. These places are as much the focus as the people who occupy them, twisting the narratives around complex histories and unique physical features that have moulded them….
Banner-maker, community artist and textile curator, Clare Hunter won the Saltire First Book Award for her debut work, Threads of Life (2019), which became Waterstone’s Scottish Book of the Month and a Radio 4 Book of the Week. Embroidering Her Truth continues this historical thread, weaving readers through episodes in Mary Stuart’s life, with an intricate examination of embroideries, tapestries, and textiles, and the subliminal messages these held.
James Connor Patterson’s first collection, Bandit Country, begins with an epigraph from Douglas Dunn which expresses a desire to ‘become a landmark’. In a sense, this too is Paterson’s aim, in his inventive collection of poems that bring voice to Northern Ireland’s ‘ceasefire generation’.
The collection displays a complexity of the language(s) employed, the rhythmic vernaculars of Ulster Scots, the cadence of the Northern Irish phraseology, and an English language heavily peppered with literary referencing; they all combine, pluralistic and porous, blending from one to the next, stitching different tongues together and showing, to use Dunn’s words again, what it is to be ‘an example of being part of a place.’
Jemma Borg’s latest collection of poetry, Wilder, is a revelation and a delight. I have not read her poetry before. I was drawn to her book because of its title, Wilder, with its dual reference to the old English—‘wilde’ from the Germanic weald meaning open field and wild as in bewilder. I have read much informative and beautiful writing from men about wilding and rewilding; however, when a writer is acknowledging their own internal ‘wild’ and its place within the natural world, the feminine gendered gaze has a particular attraction.