Reviews on The Review

Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
 In his Introduction to this volume, Harish Trivedi says that Kunwar Narain is probably the most highly regarded Hindi poet alive today. Both Trivedi and Apurva Narain emphasise how deeply the poet has read Indian literature from its Sanskrit roots to now. As an outsider to Indian culture I’m not in a [...]

Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
 
In her Translator’s Preface, Tiina Aleman explains how closely she and Doris Kareva worked on the poems in this volume. Kareva herself is a well-regarded translator who has translated widely from English into Estonian, so I assume these versions achieve a high level of fidelity to the originals. They certainly read [...]

Like Eliot’s Webster, Roy Fisher is much possessed by death.  However, it’s not the skull beneath the skin he sees; it is the relationship we have with the dead in the transition of dying; what he elsewhere calls the ‘pass and return valve’ of death, and the ‘life of the dead’.   This relationship is  a [...]

Michael Haslam’s writing is an eerie combination of late High Modernism of the Bunting and David Jones kind, and an unswerving allegiance to the poetics of the ‘Cambridge Axis’ of Prynne, Crozier and the Rileys.  Like the Bunting and David Jones, Haslam reaches back through Modernism to the alliterative foundations of Early English verse, and [...]

Bobby McFerrin’s new disc is a complete revamp of a capella in jazz, dragging it away from the finger clicking parodies of the Swingle Singers, via Manhattan Transfer into something edgier, larger and more contemporary.  McFerrin is universally known for Don’t Worry Be Happy and, occasionally, for his version of McCartney’s ‘Blackbird’.  But since those [...]

         So where does the God of Love hang out? Apparently in the company of middle class intellectuals, heartbroken widows, middle aged adulterers, devoted mothers and alcoholic stepsons with tangled oedipal issues to work out . . .  he hangs out in the motorcars, kitchens and living rooms of Middle America, a local which, for [...]

reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
 
Shanta Acharya was born and educated in India, gained a doctorate from Oxford and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard. She has written a book on Emerson, three books on asset management, and five volumes of poetry. This new collection reflects both the breadth of cultural reference and the rather privileged perspective [...]

Foul deeds will arise ere the earth o’erhelm them to men’s eyes.
 
The perspective in Hamlet seems unlikely to be shared by the main protagonist of DeLillos’s new novel, a ‘desert in the woods’ academic policy wonk grinding out the linguistic and idea upholstery to the neocon ideologues of the former Bush administration. Enhanced interrogation, rendition; [...]

In 1979, Donald Davie wrote that ‘Briggflatts is where English poetry has got to, it is what English poets must assimilate and go on from.’ Why hasn’t that happened?
One reason for the critical occlusion of Bunting is that late-modernism itself can be a bit of a cul-de-sac. On the DVD that accompanies the text, [...]

Caryl Churchill, A Number, The Library Theatre until May 9
 
Caryl Churchill’s 2002 play deals with a contentious issue, human cloning, but is as interested in making cloning into a metaphor as it is in ethics and science.  The play’s success depends on a difficult balance between argument and feeling, exploring ideas and manipulating its audience’s [...]