In 1917 Sam Mendes has created an astonishing work of cinematic art through the masterful combination of continuous, single-shot cinematography by Roger Deakins; concise, effective screenplay co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns; and haunting, dramatic score by Thomas Newman. Mendes’ direction in this film is intense. His use of long takes and clever editing bring the viewer Read More
By its nature, as the waters of the Ocean, the extent of heaven’s bliss cannot be defined. But the sphere of human happiness is like a dew-drop clinging to a blade of grass. Vidagama Maitreya, Budugunalamkaraya (‘Beauteous Virtues of the Buddha’, 15th century). Epigraph taken from The True Paradise, Gamini Salgado. Reading and re-reading The Read More
In his marvellous essay on writing about 9/11, ‘Can poetry console a grieving public?’, Mark Doty sets out the difficulties of writing about public tragedy. Can one bear witness to ‘the inchoate stuff of experience’ ─ intensely felt private pain or even anger ─ and yet also keep faith with ‘language’s project of discovering and Read More
‘All I’ve ever done with my life is follow the average course’ (The Starling) How bold of Paul Farley to open his recent poetry collection, The Mizzy, with such a provocative admission to have followed the ordinary or ‘average course’? Yet, Farley is anything but average or conventional, and throughout this latest collection, the profound Read More
Knives Out opens with a wide-angled long take of the opulent house where a death occurs. After a time, guard-dogs, previously heard dimly behind the studio logos, bound into view and pass to the right, intent on their prey. In these few moments director/writer/producer Rian Johnson establishes the mood of the film: gothic, whodunnit, film Read More
Arias is American poet Sharon Olds’ twelfth poetry collection. Her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap, which focuses on the break-up of her thirty-year marriage, won the Pulitzer Prize and the TS Eliot Prize. To say that Olds’ poetry is personal would be an understatement. It is intimately personal, corporeal, visceral, but also somehow transcendent. Her work Read More
This is Canadian-born Karen Solie’s fifth full collection and it is a strange and wonderful read, taking two outwardly unappealing themes of loneliness and indecision and exploring them fully through the eyes of the seventh-century Scottish saint St Ethernan. The titular ‘Caiplie Caves’ were the dwelling place of said saint on the sleepy Fife coast, Read More
The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes was written in the three months following Lieke Marsman’s diagnosis of a rare form of bone cancer at the age of twenty-seven. But there is nothing hasty or superficial about this slim volume which comprises poetry, letters from Marsman’s friend and translator, the poet Sophie Collin, and an Read More
A psychological thriller, entwining local myth and legend with modern day themes of love, loyalty and survival, The Unmaking of Ellie Rook leads on from Sandra Ireland’s previous works, Beneath the Skin and Bone Deep, to explore the dark side of family dynamics, skewed loyalties and emotional manipulation. Set in a fictional village based around Read More
‘When l look back now at that time, six months after my husband died, I barely inhabited myself. I was as ghostly as the ghosts I never encountered. I had left, as he died, something of my own body behind.’ (‘Fires’) In this, her fifth collection, Deryn Rees-Jones has much to ask of the muse Read More