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’, […]
King Lear, The Lowry
Two or three thin, reedy notes are looped through the Lyric Theatre’s sound system prior to the evening’s performance of the Donmar’s King Lear, they alternate, sometimes create intervals with each other like strange, invisible wind chimes. Audience members are expectant but seem perturbed, no doubt the desired effect of this pre-performance touch. Two middle-aged […]
Two Collections from Don Coles
Don Coles, A Dropped Glove in Regent Street (Signal) Don Coles Where We Might Have Been (Signal) Born in 1927, Don Coles began publishing poems in 1975 and over the past 35 years has produced ten books which possess a distinctive tone, both casual and observant, while fiercely arranging and sequencing those seeming casual observations […]
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, […]
Cat’s Eyes, St. Philip’s Church Salford, 14 March 2011
When I booked to see Faris Badwan’s Cat’s Eyes play the beautiful St. Phil’s in Salford I admit I was hoping for spectacle. The Horrors’ frontman and his skinny jeans, playing with a classically-trained multi-instrumentalist, in one of the city’s oldest churches, with his big hair – it’d take someone much less gothically-inclined than me […]
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 […]
Saul Bellow, Letters ed. by Benjamin Taylor (Penguin) £30.00
Readers of Bellow’s novels will recognise the seeds of one of the twentieth century’s greatest prose writers from the very first letter, in which a callow Bellow declares ‘I am thinking, thinking, Yetta, drifting with night, with infinity, and all my thoughts are of you.’ There is in that line not just a foreshadowing of […]
Sonic Youth, Manchester Academy, 30th December 2010
Sonic Youth’s gig at Manchester Academy sold out well before Christmas, so walking down a misty Oxford Rd to get to the academy building was to run a gauntlet of touts and mournful fans all desperately hoping for the miracle of a spare ticket. Inside, a packed crowd that ranged in age from teenagers to […]
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 […]
The Soundcarriers. Celeste. Melodic Records 2010 (MEL0070CD).
The sound of Nottingham’s Soundcarriers seems both right and wrong. One can hear in the opening bars of their second record, Celeste, their interests and influences from the contemporary to the obscure: early Stereolab, Birmingham’s underappreciated Broadcast, the cool Kosmische Musik of Neu! and Can, the psychedelic era of Italian composers Ennio Morricone and Piero […]
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 […]
Lee Rourke, The Canal (Melville House) £9.99
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Dawn Rowland, FRBS, 1 New York St, Manchester
When my other half told me he’d spotted a Modernist sculpture exhibition I didn’t know about in the city, I thought he was just trying to impress me. Quite where he’d glimpsed it was another matter, but then the foyer of one of Bruntwood’s city centre office blocks isn’t an obvious location. Although Dawn Rowland […]
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 […]
The Cure – Disintegration, Deluxe Edition
So the sequence of expanded Cure re-issues has finally reached Disintegration, for many the band’s defining album. As a long-term fan I never quite saw it that way; my favourite album was, and is, ‘the one no-one else likes’ (The Top). As time’s gone on, though, ‘the one that first got me into them’ has […]
The Charlatans perform ‘Some Friendly’, Blackpool Empress Ballroom, 15 May 2010
I should admit to a certain bias when it comes to seeing The Charlatans, this being my 19th time. But they were a decade into their career before I caught on, when they made a giant indie disco of the 1999 Leeds Festival, so a whole gig from 1990’s Some Friendly era is still a […]
Deerhunter, Club Academy, 4 May 2010
There’s something not quite right with Bradford Cox. Tonight specifically, I mean: what begins with a late start and some fairly surreal musings ends with the sound-tech lining-up receptacles for a threatened up-chuck by the front-man. The last time I saw Deerhunter make their waves of big noise it was in broad daylight, in the […]
Amy Bloom, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Granta) £7.99
So where does the God of Love hang out? Apparently in the company of middle class intellectuals, heartbroken widows, middle aged adulterers, devoted mothers and alcoholic stepsons with tangled oedipal issues to work out . . . he hangs out in the motorcars, kitchens and living rooms of Middle America, a local which, for all […]
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 […]