Temples and monuments reach for transcendence, beauty lies in the carcass of an insect, cities within cities, take your eyes from the heavens, look long and deep. These words greet us at the collection’s beginning, encapsulating beautifully the essence of William Letford’s Dirt. In the eyes of many, skywards is not necessarily paired with insects Read More
Hag-Seed : The Tempest Retold is part of the Hogarth series of re-workings of Shakespeare by “acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today” (p. 295), and of course there will be readers who cannot think why such a thing is necessary. But that is a nettle to be grasped another day. In Atwood’s story, actor-director Felix Read More
Roger Francis Langley was a Warwickshire-born poet, as well as a close friend and contemporary of avant-gardist J.H.Prynne. Complete Poems is a summation of his writing spanning a relatively short career – from 1994’s Twelve Poems to his final collection The Face of It, published four years before his death in 2011. His poem, Read More
From the very start of Kate Clanchy’s The Not-Dead And The Saved (And Other Stories), we fall straight into her powerless mess of human nature responding to a power-hungry, often pessimistic world. Clanchy’s collection of short stories considers various forms of motherhood in respect to personal development. Through dimensional, flawed characters, and with notable proficiency, Read More
This Dundee Rep and Poorboy co-production has genuine ambition that is apparent from the moment you first read the advertising for the play to the final bow of the necessarily extensive cast. That is not stated in a way that is intended to condescend. It is meant as a compliment in that they are trying Read More
(This is a lightly edited transcript of the interview; to view the whole interview, please click image above) Stephen Carruthers: Good Afternoon. I’m Stephen Carruthers from the Dundee University Review of the Arts and I’m here with Joe Douglas, the Associate Artistic Director of Dundee Rep Theatre. Joe Douglas: Hello. SC: Joe, you joined the Read More
(This is a lightly edited transcript of a filmed interview that can be watched by clicking on the image above.) Vivien Williams: Hello, I’m Vivien Williams and I am a research assistant at the University of Glasgow where I also completed recently a Ph.D on the cultural history of the bagpipe in Britain. The bagpipe Read More
Deadlier than the Male, the tabloids said. They didn’t know the half of it. When reviewing Russel McLean’s previous novel Cry Uncle, I used the following sentence, “The gritty and honest narration has a truly Scottish attitude.” This is also true, perhaps even more so, of his newest book Ed’s Dead. McLean has already established Read More
I sit in the hidden café of Bonar Hall (as a four-year undergrad student I had no idea it existed) waiting for Sandra Ireland. I hold her book in my hands and wonder what she’ll be like. The book is macabre and unsettling, dead gerbils as hand puppets and warm mugs of coffee in an Read More