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I have been struggling all day to decide how to describe Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers and the best I can manage is ‘middle-of-the-road’ (which is a bit of a surprise for a previously long-listed Booker Prize author). The writing is good, the underlying plot reasonable enough – but I couldn’t help but feel there was…
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A poem. https://iangouge.substack.com/p/the-gate-is-locked-behind-me-now
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As an in-depth curation of a publisher’s interactions with one of his authors, Dear Mr. Beckett is something of a Curate’s Egg – but what makes it entirely fascinating is that the author concerned is none other than Samuel Beckett, and the publisher the visionary Barney Rosset (who also successfully fought to get Lady Chatterly’s…
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On Thursday 26th November I will be giving a ‘launch’ reading of my latest collection, ‘A Demand to be Heard’. This will be the inaugural offering of the new bi-monthly ‘Platform’ virtual reading event. Likely to be published around the 21st November, the book contains a series of ekphrastic poems based on photographs taken at…
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Alain Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth is, in many ways, more Kafka than Kafka. Most of the time you have no true idea of what’s going on – but that’s precisely the point. The structure isn’t linear, the tense flits between past and present, characters appear and disappear at will, and in many ways every page…