There is a feeling that had Seamus Heaney entered any Dublin pub everyone would have known him, whereas Ted Hughes would have passed unnoticed in a London bar. Paul Durcan sits very near Heaney’s right hand in Irish affections, which may come as some surprise on this side of the water. Certainly, my first reading Read More
I have been reading Debasish Lahiri’s’s poetry over the past few years. He has sent me his poems in a steady stream from Kolkata where he lives and writes, and from his various journeys both East and West and I have been struck by their many-layered intensity. It is therefore a pleasure to see his Read More
“Manfred suddenly felt the gloomy effect of the wine. […] The bar had fallen silent. The regulars had suddenly ran out of topics of conversation, or perhaps felt self-conscious on account of the previously unnoticed stranger in their midst. The place was tainted now. He was no longer a nobody, but somebody who had been Read More
“I’ve said on many occasions that if a poem, once written, is exactly the same as its author first imagined it would be, then it is almost certainly a failure, and that artistic success must always involve a process of transformation.” This is Simon Armitage reflecting on the “almost electrically bright” Snow Stone poem’s lettering Read More
Asked what he did, the nineteen-year-old Stead described himself as an “object maker”; later, he added “seed sower”. Both are true of his extraordinary creative engagement in a too-short life. Originally from Cheshire, Stead trained in Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic, where he scoured riverbanks for boat carcasses and stole sleepers from sidings. Unaltered objets Read More
Coinciding with Roman Empire: Power and People, Classical Art: the Legacy of the Ancients illustrates ancient Greek and Roman culture through a dynamic contrast of paintings, sculptures, screen-prints, ceramics and drawings. Drawn from Dundee’s collection of fine art, the artworks embody the mythical influences of the ancient Greeks and the Romans. The ancient Greeks’ focus Read More
Men Gather, in Speech… is a strikingly philosophical exhibition of films by artists Emma Charles, Rose English and Abri de Swardt, which share a physical space and a connecting theme of language as a rich and perplexing medium in an artistic context. The entrance to the Cooper Gallery features text and audio interviews with the Read More
Carolyn Forché’s single-authored 2003 collection, Blue Hour, is reviewed here in advance of her appearance at the StAnza 2015 International Poetry Festival. The eleven poems which make up the collection contemplate remembrance, the transition between life and death, and the effects of war. Above all, it seems to me that Forché is concerned to present Read More
For sedentary types, watching dancers as bodies in motion is to make contact again with the dream of air and speed: the quickness of lives unbounded by the terrestrial. And so it was Friday night when the Scottish Dance Theatre transformed a bare, whitened stage space at the Dundee Rep into a quicksilver blur of Read More
Shetland native and Edinburgh Makar (appointed May 2014) Christine de Luca’s most recent collection poses, and obliquely answers, many questions so well. If a pamphlet might be termed a chapbook (originally cheapbook), then only in terms of the price, it might be that. However, from its elegant dull yellow jacket, its buff endpapers and Gerry Read More