“If we had a vision and a feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow […] and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” (George Eliot, Middlemarch.) The US Laureate, Tracy K. Smith, in her fourth collection of poetry, explores that “other Read More
At this year’s spring exhibition of Danh Voh’s photographs and sculptural installations of found and preserved objects at the Guggenheim in New York, I felt, viscerally, for the first time what had merely been an abstract idea: the rhythm of buildings, the poetry of objects, the stories that reside within, the narrative webs they are Read More
The intriguing title of Vahni Capildeo’s exquisite collection, Venus as a Bear, promises a kind of transformational prose, a mish-mash of animal and myth, of the ordinary and the extraordinary – and it surely delivers. A winner of the 2016 Forward Poetry Prize, Capildeo is undoubtedly a worthy contender for this year’s prize. Capildeo’s verse Read More
This year’s MFA students have turned the area around the Cooper Gallery into one of the most involved exhibition experiences I’ve ever seen. Josh Wilson’s Project ASaP is not only an excellent pun on the title of the course but involved me ‘asap’ in the gallery. I followed Wilson’s set of instructions to look through Read More
Kaveh Akbar’s poetry is captivating not only for its beautiful turn of phrases but also for its more profound musings in evocative lines that linger: “eternity looms/ in the corner like a home invader saying don’t mind me I’m just here to watch you nap”. Yet Calling a Wolf a Wolf isn’t simply a sum Read More
Abigail Parry’s debut collection Jinx is an exercise in sleight of hand, it’s a trick. Parry weaves the familiar elements of nursery rhymes and folktales with darker themes of sex, death and guilt into an uncomfortable combination that plays with readers’ expectations. She borrows characters and stories from those sharp-edged fairy tales with undercurrents of Read More
Shivanee Ramlochan is a jack-of-all-trades. She is an arts reporter, book blogger, editor and reviewer for The Caribbean Review of Books, and a poet living in her native Trinidad. Her first collection, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, opens with a poem entitled “A Nursery of Gods for My Half White Child”, introducing us to Read More
The MFA in Arts and Humanities is an interdisciplinary degree that gives students an opportunity to combine their studio practice with a wide range of humanities subjects, such as English, Culture and Society, Philosophy, Film Studies and Gender Studies. The synthesis of ideas has resulted in a breathtaking show. It’s quite a challenge to hike through the Crawford Building to find the exhibits, Read More
Award-winning novelist Dame Fiona Kidman published her tenth novel in New Zealand in 2016. All Day at the Movies took the New Zealand Heritage Prize for Fiction in 2016 and is now published in the UK in a new imprint for Gallic Books. Set in New Zealand, the novel begins in 1952, as war widow Read More
Part of the undoubted charm of the longstanding Pittenweem Arts Festival is discovering art in a huge variety of unexpected venues. In many cases the art is enhanced by its setting in what are normally domestic or commercial interiors. Add in the possibility of enjoying a lobster roll beside the harbour to sustain you between Read More