Rosaline Nashasibi & Lucy Skaer Cooper Gallery Dundee, 30th September – 10th December For the next three months the Cooper Gallery will be displaying the collaborative work of Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer, who have been working and exhibiting together since 2005. The exhibition, Chimera, is an enigmatic manifestation of new and familiar work by Read More
Tim Allen’s A Democracy of Poisons, his third collection with Shearsman, possesses rich, surreal imagery—visions that float or collide with the reader, betraying his avant tendencies. However, his dreams aren’t pleasant—they’re anxious, tense.
Don Quixote trades in his horse for a mobility scooter in this flamboyant and tender retelling from Dundee Rep Theatre and Perth Theatre written by Ben Lewis and directed by Lu Kemp. With wit, heart and a live musical accompaniment, Cervantes’ metaphysical comedy becomes a thoughtful commentary on modern life, alienation, growing old and also the stories we tell ourselves.
Based on a thirteen-poem series, The Wilds is a powerful poetry comic – written by Russell Jones and illustrated by Aimee Lockwood – connects the themes of grief, the natural world, and survival. It explores the experience of a teenage girl coming to terms with the death of her mother, understanding that loss is never easy but can be survived.
Sunday, 3pm. Eric Watt’s collection of selected fragments of city lives in Coming Into View, spanning several decades, an exhibition curated by Isobel McDonald and Alison Brown, today coalesce in the surround-sound of Kelvingrove’s organ recital. In a celebration of both Watt and Glasgow, portraits of ‘St Andrew’s Suspension Bridge’, in the damp of an all-too-familiar smirring rain, and girls with umbrellas traversing glistering tarmacadams, rivers of shining light (‘Kingston Umbrellas, 1960’), segue into street-kids sheltering from a ‘Rainy Day’ and echoey images of the Clyde with its tidal eddies (‘Fairfield’s Yard, 1965’).
Dead fridges, dragon-slaying horses and zombies welcome you to Holly Hopkins’ The English Summer, a wonderfully imaginative debut. Whilst remaining fantastical and playful, this collection dissects the roots of humanity and its relationship to our planet at large. Reimagining historical myths and traditions with an urbane sense of familiarity, Hopkins’ collection deracinates contemporary Englanders amidst a growing climate crisis. Reading these poems is like looking into an essential truth. Through both humour and accusation, storytelling from unique and unthinkable angles, Hopkins underscores the impending tragedy that is modern life.
In Transit explores Gordon Meade’s reflections of mortality. Informed by his varied and strange perspectives. Meade’s writing is poetic in subject more than form; his pieces are him in conversation with the reader, speaking of his life, his pains. The plainness of his words reinforces his perspective and reflections; neither flowery nor ethereal, it is bold, sharp, painful, and contains a hard, irrefutable hope of life beyond any one death.
Mexican-American spoken word artist David A. Romero’s most recent collection My Name Is Romero opens to a photograph of the poet with his siblings and grandparents to whom the collection is dedicated. In the introduction, he sets this photograph within the context of the America he grew up in: “My first memories of my last name stretch back to elementary school, and kids […] intentionally mispronouncing my name to make fun of me. However, I would notice over the years, that […] lots of people weren’t deliberately trying to ridicule my surname but mispronounced it regardless.”
Decades after leaving Iran as a child refugee, Dina Nayeri travels back to the location, both psychological and geographical, in which she waited for her asylum claim to be processed. Late in this powerful memoir, after a particularly distressing moment in her research, Nayeri must remind herself why she feels compelled to return to those early moments of her life: ‘Now that I have a daughter, it’s time I made sense of my own story and identity so she can be certain of hers.’ It is, of course, a common enough experience to find oneself reflecting on one’s origins, but to return to the themes and scenarios of Nayeri’s youth takes an especially courageous and direct gaze.
None of the poems in this, Kim Moore’s more recent collection, have formal titles. Numbers, yes, and the contents’ list identifies them by their opening words. The acknowledgements credit sources as diverse as Hélène Cixous, Thomas Hardy, Adrienne Rich and Rainer Maria Rilke, but in the opening poem, ‘We are coming’, it’s impossible not to see a baton already being passed from Sylvia Plath; soon after it’s hard to avoid shades of Carol Ann Duffy’s Red Riding Hood, or to hear Hilaire Belloc’s ‘waterfall of doom’ building its inevitable force. The tributaries are indeed wide-ranging, which seems entirely in keeping with the complex and very painful issues Moore has the bravery to explore. Rarely has it been more important to read a poetry collection in the sequence the poet has ordered; there are no lines to be skimmed.