poetry
Tom Birchenough
Return to Larkinland was the second of AN Wilson’s intimate portraits of poets, following his similar excursion to “Betjemanland” last year. His very particular form of exploration of the biographical genre results in a selectively detailed portrait seen through the eyes of an admitted admirer, a sense of character created through a pronounced feel for Larkin’s times, caught in redolent black and white archive, as well as in the attention he pays to the places and spaces of the poet’s life.Wilson knew Larkin well, but wasn’t reluctant to confront the darker issues that have been associated Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The tragic love of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath is probably Britain’s most notorious 20th-century relationship. While other controversies – for example, those of Wallace Simpson, John Profumo and Princess Diana – have been laid to rest, Hughes and Plath are still generating headlines more than 50 years after Plath’s suicide in 1963. There is, of course, more rivetingly combustible matter in Hughes and Plath’s lives than those other ill-fated lovers – which this timely and engrossing documentary captured with briskly riveting style. Most recently, those headlines have emanated from the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Huge canvases, bold, expressive brushwork and a full-bodied, vibrant palette. Chantal Joffe’s figurative paintings are certainly striking and seductive. Citing American painter Alice Neel and American photographer Diane Arbus as two abiding influences, Joffe’s portraits are predominantly of women and children who often convey a sense of awkwardness and social unease. As well as portraits painted from personal and family photographs, her inspiration has also come from pornography and fashion magazines. She has exhibited widely and internationally, and in 2006 received the Charles Wollaston Read more ...
mark.kidel
Iris DeMent’s settings of poems by the great 20th century poet Anna Akhmatova are as original as they are courageous: it's so easy to fall short of the genius displayed by the Russian mistress of the lyric verse. This is a work of love and devotion – prompted in part by DeMent’s adoption, along with her partner the equally original and talented Greg Brown, of a girl from the former Soviet Union.There is a kinship between the singer from the American South , raised in the Pentecostal church, and the tortured soul of Akhmatova, who lived through Lenin and Stalin’s terror, refused to go into Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The young casualty of genius fires imaginations and fills coffers. Last year Dylan Thomas’s centenary was vastly celebrated. The Amy Winehouse industry is still shifting units. The spell cast by Sylvia Plath seems not to diminish. A Janis Joplin biopic project is staggering through the law courts. And then there are Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all the sundry other singers and poets who, by accident or design, cut themselves down in their prime. But in the beginning, the first to die in a lonely garret of a drug overdose, was 17-year-old poet-forger Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Kate Tempest's long blonde-brown hair flailed as she prowled the stage, red-faced from exertion, adhering not a jot to the media’s tick-boxes for femininity. She is smaller, by far, than her backing band, dressed down in baggy sweatshirt and jeans. Unlikely star material yet she exuded such energized passion and righteous charisma that, by the end, as she encored with a poem that, like so many tonight, seemed to allude to the troubling political developments of last week, she had the audience rapt, completely engaged. “We never saw it coming,” she announced towards the close, “like all the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Basketball doesn’t often stray onto the arts pages. Cinema pays the occasional visit. White Men Can’t Jump starred Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as a pair of slamdunking hustlers. Hoop Dreams followed two inner-city college kids in Chicago as they tried to turn pro. The hero of Almodovar’s Live Flesh was a wheelchair-bound basketball player embodied by Javier Bardem. But what about theatre?A bouncing ball is an unruly prop, so basketball (like other ball games) tends not to trespass onto the stage. A new play by spoken word artist Inua Ellams changes all that. The Spalding Suite explores Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Emily Saunders has crafted a reputation for cool, sophisticated songs blending Brazilian themes and rhythms with a clean, precise, almost Scandinavian delivery. On this, her second album, she includes electronic sounds and distorted vocals, moulding the typical Latin aesthetic to her own musical identity with great confidence. Saunders composes music and lyrics, and also produces, so has been able to build a soundworld both unified and unique. Her lyrics are much more substantial than is frequently the case in these genres: a slickly rhymed combination of dense, highly coloured imagery Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bringing a real-life story with a well-known and shocking outcome to the screen has an inherent major difficulty. When the end does come, it won’t shock. Amour Fou dramatises the suicide pact of the German writer Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, a woman at the heart of high society who had been diagnosed as terminally ill. They both died on 21 November 1811.Amour Fou solves the problem of being burdened with an in-built spoiler by assembling a cast whose engrossing performances are enacted as if under hypnosis and by devising a mise-en-scène so striking that it becomes as important to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Even before Kate Tempest appears, it’s clear this isn’t going to be an evening of slam poetry jamming. Her band walk on, three guys who attack a line-up of electronic kit with vigour, one wielding drumsticks, alongside Anth Clarke, a striking black female MC, who looks like a 2007 nu-raver in baseball cap, white sunglasses and a crop top. They whip up a hammering electro racket before cutting out abruptly when Tempest walks on, all smiles, flowing blonde locks and a low-key black T-shirt. She breaks into “Marshall Law” from her Mercury Music Prize-nominated album Everybody Down. “Everywhere Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Poet and campaigner John Betjeman, who died 30 years ago this year, still has a public profile most writers would die for tomorrow. He shares with Philip Larkin the distinction of having written some memorably, demotically quotable lines of verse, their respective denunciations of Slough and parents being possibly the two best-known pieces of 20th-century verse.Yet while Larkin has suffered from a perception of racism and misogyny, Betjeman’s reputation as a far-sighted architectural campaigner has, with his statue at St Pancras, one of the buildings he helped save, helped consolidate Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Swansea's much-mythologised son would have been 100 in October this year, but he died in New York in 1953, from a list of medical problems exacerbated by his colossal intake of alcohol. Thomas's doomed, chaotic trajectory could almost qualify as the first rock'n'roll death, since the New York that lionised him would soon hail the Beat poets, the Folk Revival and the Bob Dylan whose adopted name and freewheelin' versifying both bore Thomas's imprint.This film about his final days and death in New York was involving and hugely watchable, with Tom Hollander tackling the title role like a pocket- Read more ...