There are some startling and beautiful images from the much-exhibited photographer Hermann Rodrigues in Rags and Reels. Visual and Poetic Stories of Migration and Diaspora, his collaboration with poet Bashabi Fraser. There’s an elderly Sikh, bearded and turbaned in a bright blue tartan jacket, holding his ceremonial scabbard. A sitar player poses in her sari on an Read More
Moss Rich was a new name to me when I picked up his book, A Psalm of Consequences for Those Who Can’t Keep Up Monthly Payments, but the title promised originality and quirkiness, and the collection subsequently did not disappoint. With both serious and comic insights into the everyday, Rich seeks to turn the humdrum into poetry. Read More
Following a career defining role in Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) and an underappreciated turn in George Clooney’s The Ides of March (2011), Ryan Gosling reunites with Blue Valentine (2010) director Derek Cianfrance for the pair’s, and indeed Cianfrance’s, second big screen venture. Given the resonance and popularity of their first collaboration, a gritty detailing of the evolution of a relationship, The Read More
Imagine a world where the great land mass of the Pangea is still intact and human history has taken an entirely different route to the one we are familiar with. A world where geo-political circumstances have resulted in African nations developing into colonial powers and Europeans becoming a marginalised and dominated people. Noughts and Crosses by Read More
The Kailyard School is alive and well in contemporary Scottish fiction, but it has relocated to Botswana. Decidedly kicking against the hard-boiled masculine orthodoxies of recent Scottish crime fiction, Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series currently spans thirteen novels and has been adapted for a BBC/HBO television series by Richard Curtis and Anthony Read More
While all directors must hope that their debut feature will be a resounding success reminiscent of Orson Welles’sCitizen Kane (1941), this is rarely going to be the case. Many debuts will be low budget disappointments that nonetheless might show a glimmer of talent and potential. However, sometimes a debut film appears that has enough confidence and Read More
Paul Bush’s film Babeldom can easily be defined as an enigma. A terrifying “mockumentary”, the film leaves the viewer feeling uneasy and disoriented, yet manages to accompany this disquietude with a sense of awe at the spectacular juxtaposition of animation and handheld cityscape visuals. The film is narrated sporadically by two voices: an unnamed female archaeologist and Read More
Jasper Fforde (Hodder Paperbacks, 2001), pbk. £7.99. Any avid peruser of the fiction shelves of second-hand bookshops very quickly realises by the sheer frequency with which certain titles recur that these have the widest readership and the most enduring popularity. Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair is one such novel (the sequel, Lost in a Good Read More
Clare Best’s first collection, Excisions, opens with a sequence entitled ‘Matryoshka’ (“nested Russian dolls”) about the death of her parents, and feelings of grief and memory. Best’s poems, which have an intensity and physicality about them, include arresting descriptions of the body, as for example in “Stitch”, My grandmother knew about seams- her abdomen ruched Read More
Jamie McKendrick (Faber and Faber, 2012); pbk, 9.99. Out There is the sixth collection from poet and translator Jamie McKendrick. It opens with an epigraph sourced from Dante’s Paradiso: “This little patch of earth that makes us all so fierce.” That juxtaposition of earth and fierce humanity resonates thematically throughout McKendrick’s poems, which articulate the Read More