Books
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Ekphrastic poetry needs, I believe, to have a link to its source material which is suitably strong and to some degree self-evident in order for it to work. The twelve poems sitting alongside images of Robert Rauschenberg’s work which are at the heart of Tamar Yoseloff’s Belief Systems for me just fail to hit the…
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The thing that strikes me most about the three plays in this collection (even in translation) is how powerful they must be to witness performed live. Indeed, should I ever get the chance to see The House of Bernarda Alba I will be hard-pushed not to take it. I imagine that with an entirely female…
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I did something slightly unusual for me when reading Mark Haddon’s The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea – I put it to one side for a while. The reason was that I hadn’t made up my mind about it; I wasn’t sure how good it was, or if…
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I think it not unreasonable to claim that Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is a ‘slight’ book. Not in terms of size (though it isn’t that large) but rather in terms of narrative and style. Not a huge amount happens it seems to me, and there is a lightness in the style which is presumably…
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This Other Eden is certainly up there with Paul Harding’s other novels, Enon and Tinkers. It’s a bit of a slow-burner to begin with which, given the subject matter, is somehow fitting. Part social and historical narrative, part love story, it lays bare a slice of unsavoury history. We may associate eugenics with the Nazis,…
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It was tremendous fun to perform “Crash – the last thirty minutes of a life” once more, this time at the inaugural Market Rasen ‘WordFest’ event on Saturday. It could end up being something I do regularly while I am able to… The hour spent after lunch reading to and in conversation with a small…
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A familiar story. Here is another collection of poems which is almost entirely single-themed (woman climbers and climbing) and which, as a result, means many of the poems blend into one another and risk losing their individual identity. Which is a shame. Especially as some of them – like the excellent “Kiss” – might be…