Ian Parks is primarily known as a love poet. The Exile’s House, however, signals a thematic departure. Although a hint of romance can be read into certain pieces, this collection is primarily about landscape and an exploration of our relationship with place. The Exile’s House considers roots and origins, investigating how perceptions of place are Read More
Estrangement, showing in the Cooper Gallery until the 16th of February, is an exhibition offering us images inspired by a sort of disconnection from the world. Estrangement can convey itself in many different forms; it can speak to the individual, the collective alienation of humans to themselves, or to a place or situation in life. Read More
The current exhibition in the Lamb Gallery, Drawn from Structures Living and Dead, features the work of three artists alongside items from Dundee University’s D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum. It runs in conjunction with two other exhibitions which share scientific subject matter and which also draw upon local talent. The exhibition is concerned with biological observation Read More
In a Guardian Interview, Andrew Motion remarked, “Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.’” Motion’s new work, The Customs House, is a challenging post-laureate collection, strongly underscored with a melancholy that brings Read More
Bullhead is the 2012 Academy Award nominated film by Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam. His other works include Carlos (2004), winner of the Audience Award at Leuven International Short Film Festival, and Today is Friday (2007) an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short, one act play of the same title. Bullhead stars Matthias Schoenaerts as Jacky Read More
This interview with Sara Sheridan and Lin Anderson took place on 26 October 2012. Having recently completed my Ph.D. on contemporary Scottish crime fiction, and having written a review of Sheridan’s latest novel for DURA (http://www.dura-dundee.org.uk/Fiction/belle.html), I was delighted to have the opportunity to ask the two authors a few questions about perceptions of crime Read More
Quentin Tarantino is always a difficult filmmaker to critique. Since Kill Bill (2003), he has specialised in making a very distinctive brand of reference-filled, “Grindhouse” style, ultra-violent action films. Looking back on his early films, however, they seem in retrospect to be a bit more mature and thoughtful in comparison to his recent films. The Read More
Salman Rushdie is a prolific, accomplished and influential writer. Midnight’s Children won Rushdie the 1981 Booker Prize and was also voted the Best of the Bookers in 1993 and 2008 as part of the best of 40 and 75 years of the Booker Award respectively. Rushdie collaborated with Deepa Mehta to adapt Midnight’s Children for Read More
Poem 18 in this new collection by London-based poet Sam Riviere is called “Adversity in the Arts”; the second half reads: I’m told how nice it is to see that I T and E have their books out I’m sure they’ll receive excellent reviews in the broadsheets it’s no exaggeration to say that there are not enough minutes Read More
A “true story”. Signalling their poignancy, these two words linger on the screen after the rest of the opening blurb has faded. The Impossible is a curious popular cinematic trompe-l’oeil, designed to capture the tragedy of the real event, but necessarily predicated on knowledge of the real-life disaster in order to create the very cinematic Read More