poetry
Album: Galliano - Halfway SomewhereThursday, 29 August 2024
Some performers are born to perform. It seems obvious, but it’s not a given in the music world. Some just want to make sound, some want to compose, not all are in it to connect directly to an audience. Rob Gallagher, however, is all about that... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2024 reviews: Chris Grace / Ania Magliano / Elvis McGonagallSaturday, 10 August 2024
Chris Grace, Assembly George Square ★★★★ How do you produce laughs out of grief and loss? Well Chris Grace does, and then some, in Sardines (A Comedy About Death). The American actor, well known to Fringe regulars as a member of improv... Read more... |
Album: Meshell Ndegeocello - No More Water: The Gospel of James BaldwinSaturday, 27 July 2024
Meshell Ndegeocello's groundbreaking new album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin takes you on a musical journey which defies categorisation.Eight years in the making and set for release on 2 August – Baldwin's centennial – the album’s... Read more... |
Sappho, Southwark Playhouse Elephant review - a glitzy celebration of sapphic loveSaturday, 11 May 2024
Who is Sappho? What is she? Not much is known about the influential Greek poet who was born some 2500 years ago. Her poetry was celebrated during her lifetime, but very little has survived. Those fragments that do exist speak of love, passion and... Read more... |
David Harsent: Skin review - our strange surfacesSaturday, 17 February 2024
David Harsent has won a lot of prizes. From the Eric Gregory to the T. S. Eliot, he has carved out a literary career positively glittering with awards and nominations, and keeps the kind of trophy cabinet that would turn many of his contemporaries... Read more... |
Angela Leighton: Something, I Forget review - the art of letting goMonday, 18 December 2023
Half way through Something, I Forget, in a poem entitled “Returns”, and subtitled “Invasion of Ukraine, February 2022”, Angela Leighton writes, “Today’s my birthday. Many happy returns. / Elsewhere there’s shot, mortar shells, grenades.”The... Read more... |
Ishion Hutchinson: School of Instructions review - learning against estrangementMonday, 20 November 2023
School of Instructions, a book-length poem composed of six sections, is a virtuosic dance between memory and forgetting, distant tragedy and personal grief. At times, Hutchinson’s language perhaps forgets itself in its own excess. His lines are... Read more... |
Jesse Darling: Virgins review - going straightThursday, 16 November 2023
Self-described ‘intermittent poet’ and 2023 Turner Prize-nominee Jesse Darling said this in a recent interview for Art Review: ‘I think about modernity as a fairytale’. The comparison is made in reference to capitalism’s beginnings, as continuous as... Read more... |
Perfection of a Kind: Britten vs Auden, City of London Sinfonia, QEH review - the odd coupleTuesday, 07 November 2023
“Underneath the abject willow/ Lover, sulk no more;/ Act from thought should quickly follow:/ What is thinking for?” In 1936, early in their tempestuous friendship, WH Auden wrote a poem for Benjamin Britten that urged the younger artist to pursue... Read more... |
Lutz Seiler: Pitch & Glint review - real verse powerMonday, 04 September 2023
Reading the torrent of press-releases and blurbs on the many – and ever-growing – contemporary poetry collections over time, one starts to notice a distinct recurrence of certain buzzwords: searing is a regular participant, as is honest, and urgent... Read more... |
Album: Susanna - Baudelaire & OrchestraMonday, 24 July 2023
After his death in 1867, it didn’t take long for Charles Baudelaire’s poems to be set to music. Composer Henri Duparc did so in 1870, but Claude Debussy’s late 1880s framing of five of the Symbolist pioneer’s verses confirmed this as more than a one... Read more... |
Nick Laird: Up Late review - attention lapsesTuesday, 18 July 2023
A few pages before the titular poem of Up Late, Nick Laird describes a haircut in a bathroom mirror, and finds a possible art form reflected back: "something like a poem / glances back / from the deep inside." The lines are broadly representative of... Read more... |
- 1 of 14
- ››
