Ed Reiss’s first book-length collection, Your Sort, is a wonderful addition to a body of English humorous writing that started with Edward Lear, and Lewis Carroll and ends up in the Mighty Boosh having come via the Goon Show, but also the warm ‘Englishness’ of Men from the Ministry, and Round the Horne. And Reiss […]
Archive by Author
Stuart McCullum: Manchester Jazz Festival, Royal Northern College of Music
Last year on this page, I reviewed guitarist Stuart McCullum’s last performance for the Manchester Jazz Festival. That performance was in the festival tent, and he was first on the bill with Trio VD and The Golden Age of Steam. Then he was performing solo with laptop and electronics. This year, launching his new album, […]
A Separation (2011), dir. Asghar Farhadi
Asghar Farhadi’s magnificent directorial debut asks one central question; how is it possible to take decisions and not be selfish, particularly in the family? When Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to take her daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) abroad for a better life, her husband, Nader (Peyman Moaadi), won’t go. His father to whom is devoted has […]
Pearl, trans. by Jane Draycott (Carcanet Press) £9.95, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Jane Draycott’s Pearl is a remarkable poetic achievement and fills what has been a frustating gap in our translated literature. There is a translation by J. R. R. Tolkien, but it preserves the formal patterns of the original at the price of syntactical contortions that make it virtually unreadable as poetry, however useful as a […]
Roy Fisher, Selected Poems ed. August Kleinzahler (Flood Editions)
The first thing to say is that Fisher’s texts have never been as well served on the page as they are here. The poems are given real space and the movement of Fisher’s breath, rhythm and cadence is as clear as it possibly could be. Fisher has found a publisher who has finally done him […]
Attack the Block (2011), dir. Joe Cornish
Attack the Block is that increasingly rare thing; a terrific British comedy. It’s a film that balances a sharp, critical social conscience about life for young London boys with no real male role models, with very slickly handled, alien invasion movie. And if that sounds like Shane Meadows meets ET then try to forget that […]
Pharoah Sanders Quartet; Band on the Wall, Manchester
Tenor sax giant, Pharoah Saunders came to Manchester on the first of May channelling the spirit and legacy of his great mentor, John Coltrane. The first half of the concert was all Coltrane favourites: Giant Steps, Naima and then, My Favourite Things. Sanders is obviously not as agile on his pins as he once was, […]
Raphael Saadiq: Stone Rollin’. Columbia
There’s a determinedly retro feel to much of Raphael Saadiq’s new album. The cover shows Saadiq in roll-neck sweater with drums and bass accompaniment playing at a party full of beehive hairdo’s, and preppies in bow ties. And much of the music harks back to the early Motown and Stax days. Tracks like ‘Heart Attack’, […]
Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability (Faber and Faber) £9.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Of Mutability is a book about death and change. Some of its poems hauntingly evoke unease, fear and loss. What is astonishing is how often the same poems, looked at from another angle, twinkle with humour, playfulness and resilient vitality. “Procedure”, the penultimate piece, is one of the most poignantly life-affirming poems I know. Here, […]
Henry Purcell The Fairy Queen : Philip Pickett The New London Consort
Had Purcell and his anonymous librettist been working in the twenty first century, they would have been had up by the Advertising Standards Authority. There is little or no resemblance between Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and this semi-staged opera. In the late sixties the Purcell Society published a comparison between the Shakespeare and the […]
Brighton Rock (2010), dir. Rowan Joffe
Donald Davie described Larkin’s poetry as a ‘poetry of lowered sights and patiently diminished expectations.’ By setting his version of Graham Greene’s novel in the summer of 1964, Rowan Joffe sets the film at a moment when society was moving between that lowered vision, and the newer world of the ‘swinging sixties’. Thus, Joffe pitches […]
Modern Canadian Poets: An anthology of Poems in English, ed. by Evan Jones and Todd Swift (Carcanet) £18.95
An anthology of Canadian poetry published by a British publisher, and edited by two Canadian ex-pats does have an in-built advantage. On this side of the great pond, at least, the readership won’t be party to the inevitable cries of foul play over the absences and inclusions, and, to a lesser extent, the editors won’t […]
Uncle Boonmee who can recall his past lives (2010), dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Beloved of Cannes, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films are deeply arthouse. Since Blissfully Yours from 2002 won ‘Un Certain Regard’, Weerasethakul’s films have won prize after prize at festivals all over Europe, and Uncle Boonmee won the director the Palme Dor, this year. Weerasethakul is one of those directors for whom linear narrative seems an impediment rather […]
Robert Glasper Trio, Royal Northern College of Music
In the post-EST era, the jazz piano trio seems to be going two ways. The European trio seems as influenced by contemporary European classical music as it is by the jazz ‘traditions’ of America. Tord Gustafsen’s trio play music that is as influenced by the folk-music of his native Norway as it is by anything […]
Winter’s Bone (2010), dir. Debra Granik
This wonderful film is held together by a mesmerising central performance from Jennifer Lawrence and immaculate direction by Debra Granik. The story is well-known by now. Lawrence as Ree Dolly is the seventeen-year old who holds her family together. Her mother is a catatonic depressive, and Ree has two younger siblings, Sonny, her twelve-year old […]
Kunwar Narain, No Other World, trans. Apurva Narain (Arc Publications) £10.99, reviewed 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 position to judge […]
Stuart McCallum, The Golden Age of Steam, Trio VD: Manchester Jazz Festival Friday, 30th July.
Stuart McCallum, The Golden Age of Steam, Trio VD: Manchester Jazz Festival Friday, 30th July. British Jazz appears to be going through a period of rude health. A generation of young musicians has been emerging fresh from jazz courses at British conservatoires with a technical brilliance and eclectic sense of influence that was on show […]
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 […]
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 […]
Michael Haslam, A Cure for Woodness, (Arc Publications)
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 Vocabularies Wrasse Records
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 […]
Jill Bialosky, The Skiers: Selected Poems (Arc Publications)
Jill Bialosky’s first publication in the UK, consists of substantial selections from her three US collections. The first of these, The End of Desire, consists mainly of pitch-perfect narratives of childhood and growing up. Bialosky moves between her own life and those of her mother and her two sisters, and gathers details of the domestic […]
Shanta Acharya, Dreams That Spell the Light (Arc Publications) £7.99, 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 one might expect […]
Laila Lalami, Secret Son (Penguin) £9.99
Lalami’s Secret Son, long-listed for the Orange prize, is an interesting debut novel. Set in Lalami’s home country, Morocco, it deliberately eschews that cliché ‘Write about what you know’, in that the central figure of the book is a young man, Youssef. He has been brought up by his widowed mother, Rachida, to believe that […]
Jerry Dammers’ Spatial A.K.A at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall
The late, great Sun Ra operated his jazz Arkestra through much of the seventies and eighties until his ultimate and untimely return to the Saturn of his ‘birth’. Ra (aka Herman ‘Sonny’ Blount) was renowned as an iron disciplinarian who inspired either devotion or scepticism amongst the players in his band. In the early 1950s, […]
Lourdes (2009), dir. Jessica Hausner
The strapline for Jessica Hausner’s wonderful Lourdes is ‘Nothing tests faith more than a miracle’. The other issue that’s central to the film is the deeply human ‘Why me?’. Lourdes is set among a tour party to the shrine organised by the Order of Malta. It centres on Christine who suffers from multiple schlerosis; her […]
Shutter Island (2010), dir. Martin Scorcese
Shutter Island is a rather odd film. The script is sometimes very good; its abrupt transitions and elliptical style ensure a good if not great performance from the film’s main star, Leonardo Dicaprio. But elsewhere the script feels stagey and mannered, resulting in rather forced performances from the European players who play the supporting characters, […]
Razmik Davoyan, Whispers and Breath of the Meadows (Arc Publications)
This book is not Davoyan’s first publication in the UK; Heinemann brought out an edition of his work some years ago but Davoyan can seldom have been as well served as in this sumptuous Arc edition, with its felicitous translations and its loving production values. In his introduction, W.N.Herbert notes that Davoyan’s work contains both […]
Still Walking (2008), dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda
This quiet, lovely Japanese ensemble piece is much haunted. It is haunted by the constant presence of Junpei, the older son whose death by drowning is the cause for the family gathering this film records. It is haunted by the Japanese film maker Yazojiro Ozu and, in particular, his Tokyo Story whose pale but intense […]
Sarah Arvio, Sono with Visits from the Seventh (Bloodaxe Books) £9.95, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
For all Sarah Arvio’s obvious intelligence, culture, technical adroitness and articulacy, I struggled with this book. In the end I didn’t feel the struggle brought anything like enough reward. My feeling of a fundamental aridity was at its most acute in Sono. The poem – a sequence of forty-two “cantos” arranged in generally blank verse […]
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 […]
Prefab Sprout. Let’s Change The World With Music. Kitchenware Records
When is a new Prefab’s album not a new Prefab’s album? When it was written and recorded in 1992-93, and isn’t played on by anyone other than Paddy McAloon. And therein, perhaps, lies the problem. McAloon is incapable of writing a bad song. He also has that touch of the truly great songwriter in that […]