- reviewed by James Webster – Those of us at the Utter 10th Anniversary Mini-Fringe back in April were treated to a real smorgasboard of spoken word talent. From Kirsten Luckins’ intensely lyrical talents (The Moon Cannot be Stolen) to Keith Jarrett‘s superb insights and meaty verse (Identity Mix-Up), but none was more enjoyable for…
-Reviewed by Rebecca Burns- Published by Liberties Press, an Irish, independent publisher, Saltwater is Lane Ashfeldt’s debut collection of short stories. Around 160 pages long, the stories share a focus upon the relationship between the individual and the sea, although the settings vary from Greek islands, New Zealand, Ireland, and southern England, amongst others. The…
-Reviewed by Andie Berryman- In a rash of pre-Edinburgh fringe shows I caught Lucy Ayrton’s The Splitting of the Mermaid at the Burton Taylor Studio in Oxford, which mercifully had air conditioning. The change of temperature also helped to acclimatise us to Ayrton’s magical world of the undersea kingdom of the Mermaids and erm, Hull. I…
-Reviewed by Claire Trévien- The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume, edited by Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby, is the first of a series of trade paperback anthologies to be published by the Literary House Press, the literary arm of The Rose O’Neill Literary House based in Washington College. ‘Anthology’ etymologically means…
-Reviewed by Sarah Gonnet- Despite the title, and repeated motifs of death and the other side; Collecting Feathers (Soul Rocks Books, November 2014) is actually a collection of tales more about the journey to get to the end point of crossing over, than death itself. Each of the short stories in this book are completely…
-Reviewed by Billy Mills- The original Germ was an organ of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Subtitled ‘Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art’, the journal featured poetry by the Rossettis and others, as well as essays on art and writing by members and friends of the Brotherhood. The first issue appeared in 1850 but the…
-Reviewed by Cath Barton- The biannual Unthology collections of short stories published by Norwich-based Unthank Books deliberately allow a wide range of stories to ‘rub up against one another’. In Unthology 5 the results are sometimes startling as the reader moves, say, from the gentle restraint of Home Counties relationships in John D Rutter’s ’79…
- reviewed by Lucy Parsons – The poetry of the people – an extravaganza of radical verse from the Morning Star. The Morning Star’s poetry column has become a popular feature of the growing Stoke Newington Literary Festival. What they both have going for them is engaging, contemporary writing for real people that has both…
-Reviewed by Bethany W. Pope- There is such a thing as a beautiful darkness. Kate White’s pamphlet The Old Madness, winner of the first Poetry School/ Pighog Poetry Competition, is a very dark, very beautiful book. Reading it is a bit like wandering into a moonlit attic full of tapestries, rich in detail, whose stories…
-Reviewed by Erik Kennedy- For the poet of faith, the bedroom is a chapel, a hermit’s cave, a sanctuary; for the poet of desire, it is a bower of bliss, a cultic centre of fancy and aphrodisia, an eroto-grotto. For JD Scott, in the thirty poems of his second chapbook, Funerals & Thrones (Birds of…
-Reviewed by Morgane Remy- How do you mourn when you haven’t had the chance to properly say goodbye to a loved one? This sore question has no unique answer but plenty. And among them, the one given by Antoine Wauters is to create beauty out of sorrow… with the precious help of the iconic Sylvia…
-Reviewed by Rebecca Burns- I approached The Rental Heart with a great deal of interest – published by Salt, Kirsty Logan’s debut collection was a recent recipient of the Saboteur Award for the Best Short Story Collection 2014, and has received high praise from various quarters, including the broadsheets and across social media. What first…
-Reviewed by David Clarke- Clive Birnie’s pamphlet Cutting up the Economist is the result of a five year project in which the author created cut-ups of headlines and contents pages from the eponymous news magazine in order to produce poems which reflect on the economic upheavals of the period 2009-2014. The poems are presented against…
-Reviewed by Ira Lightman- A “mimic octopus” isn’t a chameleon, a mere canvas. It mimes its whole body to act like another creature: either unpalatable prey or a fearsome predator. The main weakness of The Mimic Octopus is that almost no poet here takes such a steer from a source poem. The poets’ poems would…
-In Conversation with Tim Wells about his Ranting Project- I did a separate couple of interviews last year for creative writing students who kept asking me about the influence of hip hop on my poetry. One of them was non-plussed by answer that there isn’t any, and the other chose to ignore it. The fact that I…
