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 […]
Alison Stolwood, Shadowland-Albion-Burial (Excerpts)
SHADOWLAND The artist states that her work, “deals with what is un-seen. Although I operate primarily within the terms of a landscape image, my work concerns aspects of social and personal description as well as the the transience of things. My images are in a sense sets for a potential drama, a scene of anticipation. […]
Elaine Feinstein, Talking to the Dead (Carcanet Press) £9.95
This latest collection from Elaine Feinstein exudes a strangely plaintive sense of calm, perhaps because the author largely eschews melodrama, self pity and regret, therefore avoiding many of the pitfalls less skilfull or experienced poets might stumble into. There is a precision to these poems, manifesting itself in an equilibrium of emotion and intellect. […]
Three Sisters, The Royal Exchange
Three Sisters, as with so many works of the Russian literary canon, is so interminably long and inwardly orientated that it’s difficult not to feel that Chekhov’s intention in writing the play was to create some kind of elaborate, theatre based practical joke. The Royal Exchange’s new production, employing Michael Frayn’s excellent translation, always […]