This collection of Cornish poet Jack Clemo’s work consolidates poetry from all his published volumes in the first major poetry publication since his death over twenty years ago. These Selected Poems, edited by Luke Thompson, are designed to reinstate Clemo as a celebrated national poet. With this resurgence of interest in Clemo, it is important Read More
Increasingly, the passive voice in poetry tends to receive bad press. Some particularly ferocious critics are keen to strike out its very existence in verse. Like most polemics, the rhetoric contains truths and interesting pointers to alert the unwary. Also like most polemics, we might not always want to take such an extreme line. What Read More
The author, Nils Schou, a television writer and novelist from Copenhagan, engaged in correspondence with J.D. Salinger, and this was the inspiration for his distinctly Danish feeling novel Salinger’s Letters. The book follows Dan Moller, a writer and trained dentist. Moller has suffered from depression since childhood, a condition that has shaped and defined Read More
Homer’s epic has always prompted strong responses ever since its first appearance during Greece’s archaic period. Poets and playwrights ransacked it for stories in the later centuries BCE (Before the Common Era). The process continued through the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance, on through the various literary Augustan, Romantic, Victorian and Modernist periods, and Read More
The cityscape of Cork, in which Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies finds itself unfolding, is a paradoxical M.C. Escheresque backdrop. This is the debut of a seasoned and celebrated blogger, the ‘sweary-lady’ (as McInerney titles herself), and while her first expedition into extended prose fiction comes with a few teething problems, the novel finds itself Read More
Having studied Creative writing at Keele University, North Londoner Deborah Alma taught poetry. At the same time, based in a 1970s ambulance, she was also operating as an “Emergency Poet”, which involved working primarily with people reaching the end of their lives and with individuals suffering from dementia. Alma’s 2015 debut pamphlet True Tales of Read More
Shocking, harrowing, deeply disturbing, but beautifully imagined and described, Cynthia Bond’s novel Ruby will haunt you long after you put it down. It is essentially a love story set in small town America with many twists and turns, but it is in no way conventional. The love isn’t only between a man and a woman, Read More
Everybody deserves recognition for their creative achievements, unshadowed by backstories and illustrious family comparisons. Rightly, this courageous painter-poet has long been outspoken, criticising those choosing to play with her biography to suit their own ends. The press release is wisely oblique on this aspect. I turned away from the room’s elephant. Frieda Hughes is probably Read More
As the burning of the byre dies down it is “[a]s if the black gates of hell have been cast open.” The byre belonged to Barnabas Kane, his wife Eskra and their teenage son Billy, in this powerful, sad and unrelentingly dark novel by Paul Lynch, author of the much lauded Red Sky in Morning. Read More