There are poems in this collection that knocked me clean to the ground… The subject is crucial, but it’s the beauty of the poems which hold it all together….so what makes Lyall’s title special? There is her ability to bring such a dazzling array of raw emotion to the page without a hint of over-sentimentality. But there is also her profound ear for lyric and language.
Nicole has spent the last five years studying at Dundee University, gaining her undergraduate degree in English Literature before completing the Writing Practice and Study MLitt. Nicole is a keen reviewer of the arts and several of her reviews are published here on DURA. She has also been actively involved in the organising of literary Read More
Barker’s twelfth novel is a wonderfully unusual phantasmagoria of narrative and typography. It takes place in a future which has been rebuilt after the “Floods and the Fires and the Plagues and the Death Cults”; where ambition, ego, desire, death and poverty no longer exist. This calm, sustainable new world is inhabited by “The Young” Read More
Those familiar with Turgenev’s famous novella First Love may immediately expect a love affair of ill-fated, cataclysmic proportions. For those unfamiliar with the reference, the title of Gwendoline Riley’s First Love is cruelly, cleverly deceiving. A love story? Perhaps. But the bitterness and heart-breaking loneliness that plague the pages of this novel breed an unexpectedly 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
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
“But why linger? Why stay in this world of oak and tree and rock?” A quote from Hesiod’s Theonogy opens Tess Taylor’s collection Work & Days. The poems that follow – described by Taylor herself as “latter day Georgics” – serve as poetic responses to a series of questions: What kind of world do we Read More
