I’ve just spent the morning with the 24-page booklet that accompanies the latest release from Manchester-based reissue masters Finders Keepers. The write-up in small print is a history of an obscure but seminal French record label that formed out of the wind-blown ashes of the May ’68 student demonstrations in Paris. It tells this via […]
Archive | October, 2009
Maurice Carême, Défier le destin – Defying Fate, trans. by Christopher Pilling (Arc Publications) £9.99
The Belgian author Maurice Carême (1899 – 1978) is apparently much loved and seen as a major figure in his homeland. I read this volume with growing respect and a growing sense that for all their absence of obvious difficulty these were poems that would reward extensive rereading. Carême’s predilection for short (sometimes very short) […]
Katalin Varga (2009), dir. Peter Strickland
Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga is a revenge tragedy set in a part of modern-day Europe so remote that people still turn the hay by hand, put strangers up for the night and where a lone woman can drive her son on a horse and cart for miles between villages. Yet it is a place where […]
Three New Titles, reviewed by Ian Pople
20 Canadian Poets Take On the World, ed. Priscila Uppal (Exile Editions) $24.95 Anne Compton, Asking questions indoors and out (Fitzhenry and Whiteside) $15.00 Carmine Starnino, This Way Out (Gaspereau Press) $18.95 To accuse a book of generosity of spirit can be to suggest rather a generosity of ego. But generosity of spirit is what […]
New Collections from Liz Almond and Brian Johnstone, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Liz Almond, Yelp (Arc Publications) Brian Johnstone, The Book of Belongings (Arc Publications) Liz Almond’s new collection introduces us to a wide world, full of sensual pleasures but also of cruelties, pains and dangers which she suggests we must actively face and face down if we are to live life to the full. “Rosita Rules […]
Valerie Rouzeau “Pas revoir – Cold Spring in Winter“ trans. Susan Wicks; Arc Publications
Pas revoir, Valerie Rouzeau’s brilliant sequence of poems on the death of her father, is challenging in many ways and on many levels. The linguistic demands posed by its verbal dislocations and fragmentations, its allusiveness, and multiple lexical ambiguities would have put it completely out of reach of my French if I’d attempted to read […]
Vetiver, Manchester Academy 3, 7 September 2009
If we could travel back in time (and what good story doesn’t begin with a time machine?), pick up a few core members of the Grateful Dead, bring them and their gear forward and get them to release an album of Curtis Mayfield covers, one of the songs on that record (likely an Impressions-era Mayfield […]