Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel, The Gap of Time, is the first “cover version” in Hogarth Shakespeare’s series where writers including Margaret Atwood, Howard Jacobson and Anne Tyler re-tell Shakespeare’s plays to mark, in 2016, the 400th anniversary of his death. Winterson has The Winter’s Tale and, given its focus on abandonment, adoption and forgiveness, it’s Read More
McCarthy Woolf’s debut poetry collection, An Aviary of Small Birds, is an elegy to her stillborn son, Otto. Avoiding sentimentality, she relives the awful time of Otto’s stillbirth, and its aftermath, treating the practicalities and profound grief with unflinching honesty and courage. “My Limbs Beat Against Glass” is a terse eight-line poem which pulls Read More
Mark Doty’s ninth poetry collection, Deep Lane, opens gloriously, with a knowing nod to Seamus Heaney: When I’m down on my knees pulling up wild mustard by the roots before it sets seed, hauling the old ferns further into the shade, I’m talking to the anvil of darkness [.] It’s a tricky collection to review, Read More
The epigraph for Eavan Boland’s latest collection is taken from Virginia Woolf’s essay, Three Guineas – “The outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country.’” Boland might herself be, “a woman without a country”, given her peripatetic life, dividing her time between Dublin and California where she is Director of the Read More