Be you a globetrotter or a home-bird, Pia Tafdrup’s words, aptly translated by David McDuff, will grab and carry you across the world and pack you into her own personal recollections. The two collections in Salamander Sun & Other Poems deal with the tension between the poet’s desire for freedom and her deep-rooted familial ties Read More
Jackie Kay’s new collection of poetry The Empathetic Store could only be described as ‘very Kay-ish’ in that her body of work has brought about its own adjective. As a novice to reviewing poetry I felt quite daunted by the plain blue paperback, turning over its front page over to encounter what I assumed would Read More
Once Claire was asleep again, the professor removed a chunk of her brain – the ‘epileptogenic’ part – and dropped it into a bin. ‘What was that chunk responsible for?’ I asked him. He shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said; ‘we just know it’s not eloquent.’ The dedication at the front of this book is simply Read More
“I’m here. I’m here.” In “distance”, the last story in Jellyfish, Janice Galloway’s first short fiction collection in five years, the final words may be simple, but in the context of the collection as a whole, they say so much. Galloway’s characters are trapped in a variety of mundane situations; they tolerate, despair, endure, succumb, Read More
Dante drives the borrowed squad car direct. He’s an accident of flesh and blunt bones Shaped human, ugly and mostly scowling, Made bitter by the job and the city. A 2013 graduate of Dundee University’s MLitt in Writing Practice and Study, Ollie Langmead’s first publication is a sci-fi neo-noir murder-mystery, told entirely in Miltonesque decasyllabic Read More
“The longing for home and the longing for love are so alike as to be inseparable.” Malachy Tallack, journalist, musician, song-writer, is one of a new generation of travel writers for whom a journey is as much an opportunity for philosophical musings as a geographical experience. Like many of us, myself included, who spend much Read More
In Hearth, prize-winning poets Sarah James and Angela Topping have co-created an engaging sequence of “poetry duets”; paired poems that echo and spar, diverge and re-convene in that common ground of home, hearth and memory. Only the first and last poems are collaborative; the others retain each poet’s highly individual voice, yet harmonise effortlessly. The Read More
“Before I Knocked” – the title is from a Dylan Thomas poem – focuses on three images from the past: a postcard sent from California to Belfast in 1931; a photograph of two British soldiers in Jerusalem during World War II; and a family snapshot taken on an Irish beach in 1954. The essay unravels/imagines Read More
A fire engulfs and destroys a house in Connecticut, killing June Reid’s daughter and her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend. Instead of celebrating the marriage of her daughter, which had been planned for that very day, June is faced with unimaginable grief and loss. Literary agent-turned-writer Bill Clegg starts his first full-length novel Read More
In the running for this year’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction was Nigerian author and Professor of Creative Writing; Chigozie Obioma’s debut novel, The Fishermen. Written whilst experiencing a period of home-sickness as a college student in Cyprus, Obioma’s novel is a dense and impactful tale which hosts myriad themes, not least the matter Read More