Driving or walking along Shore Terrace on the edge of Slessor Gardens, most recently populated by Oor Wullies’ Last Gathering, which Dundee took so much to its heart, you will be struck by a series of 16 photographic poster-boards. Just as the plaques on the other side of the gardens celebrate past heroes and heroines Read More
Graeme Macrae Burnet (Contraband/Saraband, 2015); pbk, £8.99 His Bloody Project, is not only the title of this novel, (a work of fiction constructed to give the appearance of a factual account), it is also the title of a sensationalist chapbook referred to later in the novel, based on the memoir of our unreliable narrator and Read More
Eeva Kilpi (translated by Donald Adamson) (Arc Publications, 2014); pbk, £9.99 Eeva Kilpi has herself remarked that her works have three main themes: the evacuation from Karelia where she was born, relationships and nature. These themes are prominent in A Landscape Blossoms Within Me, which consists of 70 poems chronologically arranged and meticulously translated from Read More
Woody Allen’s yearly addiction to making films continues. As anyone who follows Allen’s work knows, its quality has been steadily dropping as the years pass. Since the millennium there have been only a few gems hidden amongst a sea of mediocre, dull or downright bad movies. How does Café Society stack up against expectations, then? Read More
Kevin MacNeil (Polygon, 2016); pbk. £9.99 On a small Outer Herbridean island, the tiny community is obsessed with literature and plagued by social divisions. Everyone writes, the traditional greeting is “what are you working on?”, and once a year they host the Brilliant and Forever literary festival. The Brilliant & Forever is an unabashedly weird Read More
Jan Wagner, translated by Iain Galbraith (Arc Publications, 2015); pbk, £10.99 In his introduction to this collection, Iain Galbraith notes that “a poem, we might hazard, is a highly sophisticated instrument for the measurement of, and ingress to, the real in all its dimensions.” This maxim exudes aptness, especially when applied to the wonderful variety Read More
Ottessa Moshfegh (Jonathan Cape, 2016); hbk: £14.99 Ottessa Moshfegh has won the Plimpton and Fence Modern Prizes for her shorter fiction, and her debut novel Eileen is now lined up for the Booker. One might ask what allows this author to dive in at the deep end of critical acclaim. If Eileen is anything to Read More
Ron Carey (Revival Press, 2015); pbk:£10 The emotions, imagination and images which characterise Ron Carey’s first collection, Distance – a work brimful of metaphor and personification, deeply rooted in his Irish background – owe as much to Dylan Thomas as to Heaney, Kavanagh and Yeats. All have their place in this long poetic journey back Read More
Choman Hardi (Bloodaxe Books, 2015); pbk, £9.95 This is the second poetry collection by Kurdish poet, Choman Hardi. Born in Sulaimani, Iraq, Hardi moved to the UK with her family as asylum seekers after the genocide of Iraqi Kurds in 1988 when 100,000 civilians were killed. She is the daughter of celebrated Kurdish poet, Ahmed Hardi. Read More
It seems self-evident that there are different kinds of poetry but this truism is well worth restating. For readers of the modern lyric whose appeal might lie in the small imagistic fragment, a well-wrought urn of words and music that speaks to a sudden, vital moment of perception as creative renewal (that sudden slant of Read More