Reading Amali Rodrigo’s Lotus Gatherers is like taking into your mouth sweetness, sharpness and bitterness all at once. Then she engages your other senses – smell, sound, texture, colour. After that you’re hooked because beyond the initial sensory pull, there are greater riches, deeper depths. Lotus Gatherers is Rodrigo’s first collection, though she has already Read More
Its hazy beauty strangely keeps it new, helps you forget the damage or the why. On sunny days, the mountain turns quite blue – this lumened place you dream of coming to. Hauntingly beautiful, Katherine Gallagher’s Acres of Light is steeped in lyricism. It is observant, evocative, and is above all, a celebration of Read More
Flocks of Words, Kate Innes’s debut poetry collection, draws deeply on her love of the medieval, the mythical and the imaginative, which she overlays with a profound connection with nature and the Shropshire hills in particular. Her music is the music of distant stars and of creation, sometimes almost Miltonian in its wonder and terror. Read More
(This is a lightly edited transcript of the interview; to view the whole interview, please click image above) Edward Small: Hello. I’m Eddie Small. I lecture in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee and we’re here today to do an interview with one of our past students on behalf of DURA, Dundee University Review of Read More
A Barrel of Dried Leaves rakes together the “corroded” past and “sing[s] the anthem” of change and patriotism in a galvanizing, all-encompassing way. The collection veers away from the expected self-exploration and, without obscurantism, places the reader in a world-reaching, overarching search for human identity. From the start, Allan Cameron challenges national identity—the entirety of Read More
Reading this collection makes one aware that being human is also a religious experience. The clash of languages throughout this collection opens doors to foreign rooms full of incense which are, in truth, situated in our own backyards. Villanueva conjures the heat of a thousand candles that envelope; billows of what seem to be unknown Read More
Alexander McCall Smith is a prolific author of fiction and academic texts, and he is best known as the writer of The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. His latest release, A Distant View of Everything, is the eleventh in a series of novels known as the “Isabel Dalhousie Mysteries”. Like the Jessica Fletcher character Read More
In his first full collection of poems and flash fiction, Thomas McColl demonstrates the truth of Seamus Heaney’s remark that poets are distinguished by their ability to “notice things.” These fifty-six pieces are notable for their acute observation and unconventional treatment of a variety of topics. In the poem “I”, a rule of grammar, arguably, Read More
[S]ongs made dearer when gone than ever they were, sung by heroes, animal spirits[.] There has been a need for this volume for some time, a need perhaps fully established at Riley’s Light, the 2015 Helen Mort-organised Leeds University conference. Indeed many luminaries, Vahni Capildeo, Andrew McMillan, Ian Duhig and more have shared that journey. Read More
Excerpt from Edward Small, The Four Marys (Dundee: The Voyage Out Press, 2017; ISBN:9780995512313)