History repeating itself… The advertising blurb announced that thirty years after the defeat of the Galactic Empire, the galaxy faces a new threat from the First Order: Supreme Commander Snoke and (a wannabe Vader) Kylo Ren. To compare Star Wars: The Force Awakens with Star Wars: A New Hope is perhaps unfair but I can’t Read More
Steven Spielberg’s films, with their interest in uplifting character arcs and nostalgic portraits of the past, are often criticised as overly sentimental and nostalgic. Bridge of Spies does little to dissuade this criticism. Its Cold War political narrative is equally as interested in the story of James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks), a fundamentally good person Read More
The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat is the debut collection of emerging talent Zelda Chappel. This compilation of fifty-nine short free-verse poems confronts themes of loss and longing, grief and regret, anxiety and escapism. Chappel’s voice is delicate yet biting, like a crisp morning frost. She cuts to the core of a distinctly female experience, Read More
Janet Sutherland’s third collection, Bone Monkey, features a trickster of that name. Sutherland develops a whole mythology for him, from creation through to death, told in sonnets, ballads, prose poems and free verse. In the opening lines of the sonnet, “Prequel”, Out of the void of chaos came the Earth and then Bone Monkey sprang Read More
Milan Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance seems poetic, personal and political on the one page and then dismissive and cynical on the very next. The novel is the perfect microcosm of the nihilistic modern world, and when that dystopia is set in the historically romantic city of Paris, it turns into a symbol of tragedy. Read More
An arresting title offers a strong launching place for any book but the reader who tries to find the source of this particularly wonderful one will have to wait. The titular poem, unusually, is the very last in this, Ellen Phethean’s most recent, collection. By the time the reader finds it however, she will have Read More
Katherine Stansfield’s debut collection, Playing House, is quirky and surreal, witty and menacing. Her subject matter includes the auction of John Lennon’s tooth, bleach, jetlag, crisp sandwiches and office politics. It’s a collection which is refreshingly unthemed and varied in style, form and voice. In “Africa on BBC One”, an East African Shoebill is addressed: Read More
Click on the above image to view Writers Read: Kirsty Gunn in conversation with Chris Powici. Powici is a poet and academic, and also the editor of literary magazine Northwords Now. His latest poetry collection is This Weight of Light (Red Squirrel, 2015). You can read a new poem by Powici, “The God of Read More
The Forbidden Room is not your average film, even for the arthouse cinema scene. It is essentially a series of vignettes, which, rather than occurring linearly one after another, interweave. In one segment a character will have a dream which itself becomes a completely different film. Some of these vignettes appear for five or ten Read More
As one of the most nominated films of the year Carol sinks only your heart, and exceeds expectations. Set in early 1950s Manhattan – a tough climate for sexual deviancy and independent women – Todd Haynes’ latest picture of homosexuality is his most refined and subtly powerful. Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Read More