Antigone may not share the fame of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, but it forms a worthy close to the trilogy of Theban plays; whereas Oedipus is, to some extent, the unwitting plaything of the gods, both Antigone and Creon, Oedipus’ successor as king, find themselves locked in a human-manufactured dilemma. After a battle in which both […]
Archive | October, 2008
Quiet Chaos (2008) dir. Antonio Luigi Grimaldi
While Pietro (Nanni Moretti) and his brother Carlos (Alessandro Gassman) are playing a keenly contested game of beach tennis, they hear cries from the sea. Ignoring advice from men on the shore that the sea is too dangerous, they plunge in and save two drowning women. When they return the women to the beach, the […]
Chris Woods, Dangerous Driving (Comma Press), reviewed by Lynne Taylor
This is the second collection from Chris Woods following Recovery. In Dangerous Driving, he continues to observe, looking inwards as well as out. In his pared-down style, Woods journeys using unassuming vocabulary. The reader is a happy passenger: has a feeling of being in the safe hands of someone who is confident of his vehicle […]
Anne Rouse, The Upshot: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books)
Anne Rouse’s The Upshot comprises poems from her first three books, presented in reverse order of publication. At the front of the book, there is a group of new poems that she has called ‘The Divided’. Rouse has always been a miniaturist; her poems seldom stray over the page, and this tendency has become more […]
Pierre Martory, The Landscapist trans. by John Ashbery (Carcanet Press) £12.95
There’s nothing but a book in a foreign language. Somebody read it and shut it on the table, Forgot it, went away. (‘Without Rhyme or Reason’) In the introduction to this collection of the translations he has been publishing since the mid-sixties, John Ashbery addresses the implied tragedy of this image: “And after I began […]
Tell Tale Signs – Bob Dylan
The devout would be forgiven for feeling the Cult of Dylan has lost some exclusivity in recent years. The release of two very hip, very high profile films (plus another, only slightly Masked and Anonymous mess) have been only one face of an accessible coolness also marked by the first volume of Dylan’s Chronicles and his […]
Sophie Ryder and Isamu Noguchi, Yorkshire Sculpture Park
It was a bright sunny Saturday for a change, this summer, and the main car park was full at Bretton Hall, home of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The terrace of the main restaurant was full, too, and the wasps were out. Sophie Ryder’s Lady Hare sculptures are oddly ambivalent things. Barry Flanagan’s series of hare […]
Jar City (2006), dir. Baltasar Kormakur
Scandanavian crime writing may have been initiated by Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow but it’s now a complete industry from the phenomenally successful Henning Mankell through to Ake Edwardson, Arnaldur Indridason and others. Indridason’s novel Jar City has now been in adapted for the cinema by the director Baltasar Kormakur. Kormakur had some success with […]
‘6 minutes’: Robert Forster, Manchester Sept 21 ’08
At the Royal Northern College for Music, a small crowd gathers at around 7:30. Mostly men, many of them look like they are meeting up for the first time in years, or the first time since the last Go-Betweens concert. With their lattes and bottled beers, they talk animatedly about, from what I hear, Man […]