Shadows dart throughout What The Wolf Heard; “skeletons” confirming the collection’s theme: their heads turn slightly in a synchronized intensification and lock on something just out of our vision. Daragh Breen’s poems are crowded with spirits and ghosts, their very ethereal nature characterizing his focus on the almost indefinable. Published in 2016, What The Wolf Read More
Roy Fisher’s latest collection, Slakki: New & Neglected Poems, epitomizes the poet’s struggle to stabilize his “everyday self — a quite presentable, penurious, and apparently unambitious young man” in his poetry. The process of putting together the collection addresses the creation of a poetic identity, the representation of Fisher the writer. Fisher’s collection is a Read More
If the purpose of a collection of short stories is to showcase the style and talent of the author, then The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim is an enormous success. All previously published in the New Yorker over the space of fifteen years, these stories offer a delicious coverage of the author’s Read More
One to hear One to remember And one to drink. The quietness of this little novel, The Noise of Time, is its weapon. Inside a jacket which shouts its title in blocky text and sings the author’s praises, a story is whispered covertly to the reader in snatches of non-linear narrative. This fictionalised biography of Read More
The subtitle for Robert Macfarlane’s Orphans is, intriguingly, “Poems borrowed by Martin Johnson.” The collection started life as a public challenge to writer Robert Macfarlane to “release the poetry that lay undiscovered in his prose.” When Macfarlane declined the task, Johnson took it on. The back cover offers a precedent for Johnson’s proposal: “Edward Thomas, Read More
her black door like an omen […] As the title implies, Buried Music resonates with losses, being filled with many kinds of grief. The collection addresses bereavement (especially that of his father) principally, but also it considers the poet’s own challenged and diminishing health. For all that, Buried Music mines the quirkiness of Read More
What strikes you immediately with Greetings from Grandpa is Jack Mapanje’s voice. The poems have a directness, as if the poet is speaking straight to the reader, plainly and conversationally. Poet and reader in the same room. Mapanje is a Malawian poet, linguist and human rights activist who was imprisoned from 1987 to 1991 by Read More
Philip Ruthen’s latest collection, Familial, is published by the Waterloo press. This is his third collection after Jetty View Holding and Apple Eye Feat. Familial explores a multitude of landscapes, both psychological and physical. The poems articulate strange realities, whether it is the voices of inmates of psychiatric hospitals (“Prelude (Cluster)”), the “curiously satisfied distress” Read More
Cooper Gallery, DJCAD 20th January – 4th March 2017 Cooper Gallery brings us the final chapter of a two-part exhibition and accompanying events series, Of Other Spaces: Where does gesture become event? With the title’s nod to readings of Hannah Arendt, we are to expect intelligent, philosophical, and feminist thinking – Of Other Spaces gives Read More
Cooper Gallery, DJCAD Chapter One: 27th November – 16th December 2016 The antecedent of a two-chapter display, Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? features artists, writers and thinkers, together eliciting the essential role of spontaneous collaboration in life. Acknowledging and celebrating the journey of feminism in the past half-century of artwork, Read More