poetry
Lisa Halliday: Asymmetry review - unconventional and brilliantSunday, 04 March 2018
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a... Read more... |
CD: Young Echo - Young EchoMonday, 12 February 2018
Young Echo is a sprawling Bristolian collective, comprised of individual musicians Jabu, Vessel, Kahn, Neek, Ishan Sound, Ossia, Manonmars, Bogues, Rider Shafique, chester giles [sic] and Jasmine, who combine and re-combine in various permutations... Read more... |
CD: Baxter Dury - Prince of TearsWednesday, 25 October 2017
As son of the famous Blockheads frontman, Baxter Dury has always had big (new) boots to fill. Over the last 15 years though, he’s become distinguishable in his own right for his Chiswick accent and roughened-up pastoral music. Both are just as... Read more... |
Victory Condition, Royal Court review - Ballardian vision of the contemporaryTuesday, 10 October 2017
What does it mean to feel contemporary? Feel. Contemporary. According to theatre-maker Chris Thorpe, whose new play Victory Condition has just opened at the Royal Court in tandem with Guillermo Calderón’s B, being contemporary is a really disturbing... Read more... |
Sand in the Sandwiches, Theatre Royal, Haymarket review - delightful but sanitisedThursday, 01 June 2017
Bard of Metroland and scourge of Slough, John Betjeman is, alongside Philip Larkin on parenthood, still one of the 20th century’s most-quoted poets. Hugh Whitemore’s play, part highlights reading and part biographical drama, offers a hugely charming... Read more... |
A Quiet Passion, review - 'Cynthia Nixon is an indrawn Emily Dickinson'Friday, 07 April 2017
Is there something about the recessive life of Emily Dickinson that defies dramatisation? I'm beginning to think so after A Quiet Passion. The Terence Davies film may attempt a more authentic take on the unrelievedly bleak, and also great, 19th-... Read more... |
Neruda, review - 'poetry and politics'Friday, 07 April 2017
Chilean director Pablo Larrain has described Neruda as a “false biopic”, and it’s a film that surprises on many levels in its presentation of Pablo Neruda, the great poet who is his country’s best-known cultural figure. It captivates for the scope... Read more... |
10 Questions for Poet Tommy SissonsWednesday, 22 March 2017
Tommy Sissons is a 21-year-old poet, originally from Brighton, now based in London. He has won a number of poetry slam championships, and has performed across the UK at venues ranging from the Boomtown Festival to the Royal Albert Hall. His debut... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Michel Houellebecq - Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013Sunday, 08 January 2017
The American poet-critic Randall Jarrell once entitled a collection of essays A Sad Heart at the Supermarket. He might have enjoyed Michel Houellebecq’s poem “Hypermarket - November”. Its forlorn narrator has “stumbled into freezer”, then “collapsed... Read more... |
CD: Hollie + Metropole Orkest - Poetry versus OrchestraMonday, 28 November 2016
Performance poet Hollie McNish and composer Jules Buckley specialise in taking their respective art forms to new audiences. They’ve gone for a double whammy with this enterprising collaboration, the brainchild of producer Kwame Kwaten, bringing... Read more... |
Leonard Cohen: Turning the Darkness Into BeautyFriday, 11 November 2016
Leonard Cohen, who has died at 82, was one of those artists born with a wisdom and maturity that cut deep into the baby-boomer youth culture of his times. He provided the perfect antidote to the innocent optimism of the 1960s, a vision shot through... Read more... |
10 Questions for Director Lucy BaileyWednesday, 26 October 2016
Theatre was not Lucy Bailey’s first target. At school she was a flautist, headed probably for music. Then, in her gap year, she took a job as a telephonist at Glyndebourne, and noticed a vigorous man with a beard – name of Peter Hall – moving people... Read more... |
