Picking up Daniel Thomas Moran’s seventh poetry collection, A Shed for Wood, I found the very title intriguing. I wondered at its importance and so turned to the writing itself, intent on discovering the ideas and implications stowed within — its “poetic” meaning, so to speak. What I did discern was that such an approach Read More
Even for leading Edinburgh crime reporter, Doug McGregor – a man who lives off the brutality of others – the sight of his editor’s organs spilling onto the desk before him is not easily forgotten. Nor should it be, the killer’s shots announcing the start of a deadly race against time. No matter how random Read More
This is an edited transcript of Alex Henry in conversation with Neil Broadfoot for DURA conducted at the Dundee Literary Festival, 24 October 2014. The full audio recording can be heard by clicking on the video image. Reviews of Neil Broadfoot’s two novels, Falling Fast and The Storm can also be read on DURA. Alex Read More
For any reader, the familiar offers easy comforts. Finding fresh material can be daunting in the strange avalanche of the new, and perhaps this is also true for poetry. Poets often struggle to be heard, to entrance wary readers and overwhelmed publishers. Caboodle offers a selection of not just two or three poets, but six. Read More
I didn’t want to finish this book. Of course, all poetry should be savoured, not swallowed quickly in large chunks and this collection is indeed quite meaty. Before moving to specifics, I’ll start with some general points. It’s a perplexing title, is it not? These poems take the reader to Stornoway on the Isle of Read More
Open studios and exhibitions staged outside traditional white-walled gallery spaces are invariably more welcoming than those occurring within institutional confines. Enjoying art in less fussy surroundings encourages us to be less fearful of the maker or the medium; thus liberated, we become more curious about form and craft even as we savour the transgressive freedom Read More
Scorper by Rob Manguson Smith is a novel centred around scorping – the act of scooping out excess wood when creating a carving or engraving – under the advisement that “the artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist”. In the Sussex town of Ditchling our Read More
The Persian-Dutch writer Kader Abdolah was an opponent of the regimes of both the Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini, ultimately fleeing to the Netherlands as a political refugee in 1988. He has a degree in Physics, was Writer in Residence at Leiden University in 2006, and has written a large number of novels. The King (“De Read More
The epigraph for Eavan Boland’s latest collection is taken from Virginia Woolf’s essay, Three Guineas – “The outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country.’” Boland might herself be, “a woman without a country”, given her peripatetic life, dividing her time between Dublin and California where she is Director of the Read More
Philip Gross’s Later follows his much praised collection Deep Field, and the T.S. Eliot prize-winning The Water Table. Largely inspired by the difficult final years he spent alongside his father, this collection moves through the complex traumas of the failing body, and the creeping uncertainty of the mourning process, towards a tentative interaction with the Read More