Alan McKirdy’s first claim in Set in Stone is: “I am a geologist by accident rather than by design!” A happy accident, as it turns out, as McKirdy’s enthusiasm shines through in his book. Set in Stone is an attractive study of Scotland’s geology for several reasons. The most obvious of these reasons is the Read More
“This little patch of ground was exactly that: common. And all the richer for it.” In a sense, this sentence summarises both the strengths and weaknesses of Common Ground. In particular, pragmatic people are likely to ask: “If it is so common, what warrants writing so extensively about it?” From a reductive perspective, one might Read More
One might think that if you are the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Cambridge University creative attempts might turn out to be overly academic. Or you could be Simon Jarvis and write Jerusalem Deleted, which is an epic poem – an unusual choice considering that most contemporary poetry tends to be published Read More
Dark Matter is a poetry collection that may be problematic to get to grips with. This is in part due to the fact that Aase Berg was a member of the Surrealist Group of Stockholm in the 1980s. The problem, however, does not primarily rest with the collection’s surrealist undertones, but with the overall complexity Read More
Iain Bamforth’s A Doctor’s Dictionary: Writings on Medicine and Culture is a collection of essays, written by a doctor-cum-poet, which at first seems to offer little in the way of enticement to the reader: it contains copious amounts of enumeration and, as a consequence, lengthy sentences that are interlaced with heavy but necessary levels of Read More
Neil Rollinson has published three collections of poetry before Talking Dead, and is a past recipient of a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. He has also garnered a reputation for being polemical. His case is arguably quite similar to that of Henry Miller, who is often misinterpreted as a misogynist purveyor of smut. Read More
Sceptics of literary prizes might claim that winning the Booker Prize once is a fluke. However, this point of view is hard to justify if an author wins said prize twice, and Australian author Peter Carey is one of only three people to have done so to date. Born in 1943 in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Read More