First published in 2003, Wolf Tongue has been re-printed by Bloodaxe, complemented by Paul Batchelor’s illuminating book of essays, Reading Barry MacSweeney, also reviewed here on the DURA pages. MacSweeney, a prodigious poet, selected most of the poems for Wolf Tongue before his death in 2000. For much of his life, he was little known, having Read More
On opening Rana Dasgupta’s reflections on Delhi, I wondered which image of the capital I would find among its pages. Would it be that of resplendent Chandni Chowk, buoyed by magnificent Mughal architecture, offering up an array of unmatched cultural experiences? Would it be the city on leafy Sansad Marg, the heart of Indian government for Read More
In a recent online conversation with John Glenday on the subject of poetry editing, Don Paterson confessed to being a notorious re-drafter (ninety variants are not unknown), and fastidious about the ordering of poems in a collection – whilst simultaneously acknowledging that the reader is unlikely to fret much about the outcome. With that in Read More
Sleeping Keys is Jean Sprackland’s third poetry collection. It was published in September of last year, following on from her 2007 Costa Poetry Award winning Tilt. Sleeping Keys “looks back at endings and beginnings” – taking its title from one of the poems that epitomises Londoner Sprackland’s chosen themes. The “obsolete treasure[s]” that are “decommissioned Read More
Sirkka Turkka (b.1939) is widely acknowledged as a major figure in contemporary Finnish poetry. Since her first collection A Room in Space in 1973, she has published some twenty collections to critical acclaim, winning both the Finlandia Prize and the Eino Leino Prize. This collection, A Sure Star in a Moonless Night, has been translated Read More
Cynan Jones has a light touch with painful and ugly truths, as illustrated in his latest novel, The Dig. At the heart of this short work set in rural Wales is the intense desire for an elusive harmony, for which the principal characters search in very different ways. The themes of The Dig are isolation Read More
The back cover of Marianne Morris’s The On All Things Said Moratorium, instead of the usual editorial blurb, presents a statement. The poet refers to how language shapes the way we think and the manners in which we structure our lives, culture and society, adding: “the specific, intentional, and pointed use of language may also Read More
There is something compelling about the recent spate of texts that employ cartography or walking as a trope for addressing how we inhabit our environments: finding the rhythms of place and space, marking your body in relation not only to the world around you but also to physical, textual and figural ‘others’ that have traversed Read More
This is an edited transcript of Lindsay Macgregor in conversation with Robert Alan Jamieson for DURA conducted at the Dundee Literary Festival, 23 October 2013. The full audio recording can be heard by clicking on the video image. LM: Well, good afternoon everybody and welcome to Dundee University Review of the Arts. We’re very Read More