‘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
It would be easiest to describe Anthony Anaxagorou’s debut collection, After the Formalities, as one that deals with Big Issues. Racism, immigration, and trauma all feature large here. Add to this, as per the publisher’s blurb, ‘tracking the male body’, ‘the threat of violence’, and ‘global histories’. These are all appropriate things to write about, Read More
Manuel Rivas’ latest collection of poetry The Mouth of The Earth touches on themes familiar to his previous fiction, poetry and journalism: nature, historical memory, invisibility and necessary attention. In The Mouth of The Earth, it is the economic use of language that initially impresses. Witness the expanse of the three lines that open ‘The Read More
Dundee Rep Ensemble’s latest Christmas offering, in association with Noisemaker and Selladoor Worldwide, is Oor Wullie. A new musical directed by Andrew Panton, the production is an adventure filled with charm and laughter – all delivered in guid Scots, of course. Whether audience members have been reading about Wullie for eighty years, or are new Read More