I have an admission to make: I went to see A Bigger Splash entirely for one of my favourite actors, Tilda Swinton. In the Swinton watching review, this is a very interesting and entertaining film. Swinton plays an aging rock star who has temporarily lost her voice, meaning most of her performance is either silent Read More
With Storms Gertrude and Imogen raging outside, Kim Leine’s The Prophets of Eternal Fjord has kept me going all winter. The biblical proportions of the book itself make it unwieldy, and trying to read it in bed feels suitably like an act of penance. Physical and mental hardship defines life in colonial Greenland in the Read More
Rams is the story of two stubborn brothers who must put aside their differences to protect their animals, creating an interesting dilemma for the viewer; we want to support the brothers’ decision to disobey the law but there are numerous conflicting factors warning us not to. The film follows an ageing man on his journey Read More
Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning American poet, born in 1953 in New York. Since graduating from Princeton University in 1973, she has lived in California, where she has lectured at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her previously published poetry collections, five of which were awarded prizes, she is an essayist and editor Read More
Willis Barnstone is an American poet, who is also known as a translator. His work draws on multiple languages and references, both to the works of other poets and also to philosophical theories, all undertaken in a rigorously intellectual manner. Barnstone believes that much of our western modern culture is rooted in Greek philosophy. Yet, Read More
The StAnza lecture is one the mainstays of Scotland’s International Poetry Festival with past luminaries such as Glyn Maxwell, Michael Schmidt, Gillian Clarke and Neil Astley holding forth. It is a tricky juggling act to get right because the lecture is heard by aspiring poets, established poets, academics and poetry readers, as well as folk Read More
“I had at the end of 1968 become literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre. This had happened largely by accident.” This kind of lucky accident often happened to playwright and director David Hare, who in a poll in 2000 by the National Theatre, had five plays selected in the top 100 and was 10th Read More
Ageing is something we all experience and, as a society, to some degree fear. This fear is manifested in the selling of “anti-ageing products” – a market worth extortionate amounts of money that claims to reverse the outward signs of this process and, at its most extreme, even to outsmart life itself. The candid collection Read More
Before the stiff Monsignor bends To butter me with chrism, do these things for me; air the suit from Gieves & Hawkes, cut to a shape I haven’t been since eighty-three; black and shine my wedding shoes with Cherry Blossom from the tin below the stairs; choose a shirt (collar fifteen and a half), Pringle Read More
A creative project such as VERSschmuggel, of which this book is the offspring, is a remarkable thing. Funded by Literaturwerkstatt Berlin for the 2014 Berlin Poetry Festival, four Scottish and two Scotland-based poets spent time in Berlin with six German counterparts. With considerable assistance from translators, they paired to transform each other’s work into an Read More