Sylvia Patterson’s I’m Not with the Band describes a three-decade long love affair with music. The esteemed journalist’s turbulent life is set against the highs and eventual lows of pop music and the media business she worked in. Her writing, like her first job in music journalism, magazine Smash Hits, mixes silly anecdotes (the favoured Read More
A Poetry Society Recommendation, David Pollard’s Finis-terre is an examination of mortality and creativity as the poet-narrator reflects on life and death while standing at a finis-terre – the end of the world. Spending half his life in Galicia, Northern Spain, Pollard has sailed past the Costa de la Muerte, where many sailors have perished, Read More
Ravaged by grief, Scottish couple John (Paul Higgins) and Karen (Kate Dickie) go feral in the French Pyrenees after losing their son in Tom Green’s suspenseful thriller, Couple in a Hole. Leaving the technology and pressures of civilisation for the calm of the forest is hardly a new concept in cinema (Into the Wild, Antichrist, Read More
Laced with the sexuality and the associated violence we have come to expect from Angela Carter, her somewhat forgotten poetry does not disappoint. Editor Rosemary Hill highlights that very frisson in her new collection of Carter’s published verse Unicorn. Much like Carter’s earlier novels Several Perceptions and Heroes and Villains, her poetry has been neglected Read More
Using the voyeurism of cinema as a medium for the superficiality of the fashion world, Mads Matthiesen’s latest film The Model stares down the cold and unblinking camera lens at the notoriously harsh industry. Focusing on body image, the film does nothing to glamorise the lifestyles of those working within high fashion, examining the mind-set Read More
The seventh poetry collection by poet, artist, curator and vanguardist SJ Fowler, {Enthusiasm} is raw, fast and ferocious in its delivery, taking on subjects such as war, modernity and the environment, mixing these with references to popular culture. Full of energy, sometimes aggressive, Fowler’s collection is aptly titled, as its pieces are thrust at the Read More
Tim Liardet’s The World Before Snow, his second collection to be nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize, is described by Carcanet as “a book of passionate extremes.” Inspired by the poet’s chance meeting (and subsequent love affair with) an American poet after the two were trapped in a Boston museum during a snow-storm, the collection showcases the transformation and self-exploration Liardet underwent following this encounter. This is a collection of contradictions: of loose and tight images, long and short stanzas.