Stuart Paterson is an Ayrshire-born poet writing in both English and Scots. Border Lines is his third collection, its twenty-four poems focusing on Dumfries & Galloway’s landscape and people. Beginning with a manifesto of sorts; “High Tide at Sandyhills” sees the world open up beyond the Galloway coastline, but ultimately the poet is unable or Read More
Small Consolations, is Gary Glauber’s first collection. Divided into four sections “Occupations”, “Explorations”, “Situations” and “Infatuations”, this meaty volume appears not only dense in format on the page, but also uniformly dense in thought, image and rhythm. The titles of the sections themselves reflect the degree to which Glauber uses alliteration, assonance and rhyme to Read More
Lucy Newlyn’s latest poetry collection is, as she puts it in “Not Ours”, “scholar quiet, cerebral”. Earth’s Almanac is a journey both through the seasons and through grief, attempting to find “a grammar of loss – a way of grasping / the shape and structure of desolation” (“Wreck”). The poems cohere around the death of Read More
By the time I come down amongst the trees around the house, the last reflected daylight in the west has faded to uniform grey beyond their branches, and the stream which feeds the big pond is loud over the stones. Still air, dimming and thickening. The light has gone completely where the boughs of the Read More
“When I was crazy and the winds of the world blew in my head, I lived in the basement of our old house, Drum Tower.” For me, the first line of a book has always held a certain fascination. It is here that the writer offers the reader the first indication of the journey upon Read More
The Ten Days Executive by Rhoda Bharath is a collection of short stories the quality of which came as a pleasant surprise to me. Prior to reading this collection, I had never encountered Bharath’s work and came to this review with no preconceptions. As I delved further into her writing I was struck by its Read More
Despite Variety’s recent claims of his demise, Terry Gilliam is yet at large. As the cartoonist turned filmmaker’s 75th birthday approaches, he shows no sign of slowing down. Having spent the greater part of this year hopping continents in a whirlwind of publicity, taking his 2014 feature, The Zero Theorem, to Europe, touring with his Read More
Tramway is a well-chosen venue for this year’s Turner Prize exhibition, Tell Me Something New. The contrast between the concrete inserts of the tram tracks and the clean minimalistic display gives an everyday feel which complements the work’s social significance. However although the setting enhances the artwork, I find the layout a little confusing. This Read More
At 148 minutes Spectre is the longest running Bond film to date. In a franchise with over fifty years of car chases, bikini clad Bond girls, chauvinistic spies and vodka martinis our expectations are high. With this in mind, director Sam Mendes also has the arduous task of positioning Spectre as a sequel to the Read More
In her debut novel, Beauty Tips for Girls, Margaret Montgomery satirises the beauty industry and the social pressures put on women in modern Western culture with wry humour. Montgomery illuminates some of the absurdities of popular culture through an interesting narrative style compiled of letters, newspaper and magazine excerpts, as well as the personal narratives Read More