Rourke’s novel is set on a stretch of the Regent Canal between Hackney and Islington, a symbolic hinterland between Old London and New Labour’s London. Its unnamed narrator, having recently resigned from his job, returns daily to the same bench and watches the swans and the coots and the slick-suited workers going about their business […]
Archive | July, 2010
Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick ed. by Darryl Pinckney (NYRB) £7.99
On this side of the Atlantic, Elizabeth Hardwick tends to live in the shadow of her husband, Robert Lowell.In America, however, she is seen as a major literary figure in her own right.Born in Kentucky, she decided early on that New York was the place to develop a career that encompassed the creation of the […]
Bicycle Diaries, David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries (Faber) £8.99
Byrne’s half-travelogue, half-pro-cycling-manifesto is probably not, unfortunately, the magic book that will persuade car owners to leave their vehicles at home, bus drivers to give cyclists an extra foot of room, Jeremy Clarkson to take a monastic vow of silence, or any of the other things that would make life safer and more enjoyable for […]
Jane Weaver. The Fallen By Watchbird. Bird Records 2010 (10EGGSCD).
Amid the casualties of punk rock’s necessary and thrashing critique of popular culture and music in the mid-seventies was folk rock and psychedelic music, which had blended in so many angry young minds with the era’s MOR meanderings of British Prog. Folk became a bad word, associated with hippies and a bygone era of flared […]
Doris Kareva, Shape of Time, trans. by Tiina Aleman (Arc Publications) £10.99, 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 well in English and […]
Two Books on Roy Fischer, reviewed by Ian Pople
Roy Fisher, Standard Midland (Bloodaxe Books) £7.95 An Unofficial Roy Fisher, ed. by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books) £12.95 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 […]