Walking the hill country around my Aberdeenshire home, my feet seek tracks to follow, ways that have already been made plain. Animal tracks direct me to water, guide me through a bog, or along the firmest contours of a slope. But the human pathways through the hills are more compelling – the old drove roads, Read More
Jane King’s collection Performance Anxiety draws together poetry from two previous books which were first published in 1993/4, in combination with more recent work. Performance Anxiety is a holistic, well-chosen collection that works around central themes of identity, theatricality and female experience. King’s work has a considerable autobiographical focus. In her 1994 poem “Wash Day”, Read More
The third novel of the Glasgow born and bred novelist and scholar Nick Brookes, Indecent Acts is a book whose characters and themes remain with the reader for a long time, despite an initially challenging quality to both the content and the language of the volume. The book is written entirely in the first person, Read More
Peter Bennet’s Border is one of the most idiosyncratic contemporary poetry collections I have ever read. Uniting poems from his past collections – Goblin Lawn, (T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted in 2007), The Glass Swarm, and The Game of Bear – with new pieces, Border is a substantial work. It is titled most appropriately; borders – between Read More
Bill Manhire is the pre-eminent voice of New Zealand poetry; that country’s first Laureate, and author of over a dozen collections, stretching back to the earliest part of the 1970s. He found some notoriety in his early career when a short poem, “Wingatui”, whose meaning was partially rooted in the vernacular of the New Zealand Read More
Simon Jarvis’ Night Office is a timely reminder of poetry’s capacity for extraordinary reach and intensity. Night Office is a 7000 word, rhymed poem which seems to formally arrange the thoughts and feelings encountered over one night of wakefulness. These referenced prayers, spoken through the night, offer waking consciousness as a form of devotion that Read More
Something Chronic is a first novel by Dundee-born writer, historian, gay-activist and journalist Bob Cant. Set in Dundee and its surrounding area in the 1990s, this is a generous, quirky and humorous narrative that brings together local and global voices. It bridges the past and the present successfully and coaxes the reader not to dismiss Read More
With due deference to his two best-known and most lauded films, Chinatown and The Pianist, Roman Polanski has always been at his best when working on a more intimate scale, with small casts in a claustrophobic setting. Indeed, one could already see this in his masterful first film, Knife in the Water, a virtual three-hander Read More
Last summer, I met up with a close childhood friend who has lived abroad for many years. Heading to the pub, I was surprised to find myself nervous at the prospect of meeting him again after so many years. What if we’d changed, grown apart? What if we no longer had anything to talk about? Read More
Followers of Jia Zhangke’s filmic output might be surprised by his latest offering. His body of work is known for its blending of fact with fiction and its combination of understated social commentary and humanist philosophy. As such, the unflinchingly violent A Touch of Sin may, at first glance, seem somewhat incongruous. Drawn from four Read More