The Scottish National Portrait Gallery was just a refuge from the pipers and Fringe flyers on Princes Street, so I was unprepared for this whopping triple portrait, executed at dramatic scale and measuring 2½ metres by 2 metres. The floor dropped away and the gallery vanished. I had disturbed Professor Sir Alfred Cushieri and feltContinue reading “Piercing the Veil: Fiona Moore’s The Distal Point”
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Kevin Reid’s Burdlife
Its high pitch and speed makes birdsong feel utterly alien. However, Marcus Coates’s stunning installation, ‘Dawn Chorus‘, closes that distance. Individual birdsongs were captured in a woodland at dawn and then slowed to the point that they became reproducible by the human voice. They were sung, recorded and located in positions in a gallery spaceContinue reading “Kevin Reid’s Burdlife”
Let’s talk about sex, baby – Jennifer Copley’s Some Couples
Suede’s debut single, ‘The Drowners’, enacts a war between Butler’s masculine, strident rhythm guitar and the androgyny of Anderson’s lyrics and vocal delivery: ‘We kiss in his room to a popular tune / Oh real drowners // Slow down slow down you’re taking me over’. There are undertones of violence in the song and the desiresContinue reading “Let’s talk about sex, baby – Jennifer Copley’s Some Couples”
Timewatching – Luke Wright’s The Toll
My father’s watch clasps my wrist now. Big shoes to fill, his shoes. The removal of three links slimmed it for my scrawny wrist yet, standing by my chair, my five year old son, puzzling its butterfly catch, lets it slip down his arm to nestle in the crook of his elbow. A single goldenContinue reading “Timewatching – Luke Wright’s The Toll”
Back to Black -Charlotte Gann’s Noir
Setting the tropes of film noir aside for a moment, Raymond Chandler’s iconic sleuth, Philip Marlowe, feels more like Eliot’s Tiresias: knowing and foresuffering all, peeling back the cheap tin lid on the eternal drama of exploitation playing itself behind the inscrutable facades of suburbia. In The Big Sleep, the clean lines of LA interior design comment on a shady underworld asContinue reading “Back to Black -Charlotte Gann’s Noir”
Knives out – Matthew Stewart’s The Knives of Villalejo
Our Gothic dopplegängers suppress our unease. Conveniently externalised, Mr Hyde and Victor’s creature stalk the margins. We reassure ourselves that the monsters are beyond our thresholds and insulate ourselves from the threat without by wrapping tight in the tissue of domesticity. Thomas Hardy, never one to flinch from the truth, saw things differently. In ‘The Going’,Continue reading “Knives out – Matthew Stewart’s The Knives of Villalejo”
Ian Duhig’s ‘The Blind Roadmaker’
This review was commissioned for the T.S. Eliot Prize newsletter and is reprinted with kind permission. This review was commissioned for the T.S. Eliot Prize newsletter and is reprinted with kind permission. This review was commissioned for the T.S. Eliot Prize newsletter and is reprinted with kind permission. Who does a society decide to memorialise and who does it shuffle toContinue reading “Ian Duhig’s ‘The Blind Roadmaker’”
Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation
This review was commissioned for the T.S. Eliot Prize newsletter and is reprinted with kind permission. Vahni Capildeo’s Forward Prize winning Measures of Expatriation opens with an Old English dedication, ‘Eadig bið se þe eaþmod leofaþ’ (Blessed is he who lives humbly), taken from the cold, salty exploration of isolation, ‘The Seafarer’, a poem which helpsContinue reading “Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation”
The 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize
For various reasons, 2016 was not much of a year for reading, or reviewing poetry. So, the experience of reviewing the collections shortlisted for the 2016 T.S. Eliot prize was an intense one: a book a week from October to December. Rachael Boast’s Void Studies was the first up and this was a poetry collectionContinue reading “The 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize”
Mr Disco – Robin Houghton’s The Great Vowel Shift
I sometimes recollect my final visit to a nightclub, where I now hear the passing bells of time’s Technics decks, not the vigorous immortality of youth. And this moment doesn’t feel like a maudlin indulgence. Those thunderous spaces once had the potential to inspire (although I was always more attracted to them than belonged). But then my needle skipped to whereContinue reading “Mr Disco – Robin Houghton’s The Great Vowel Shift”