Poetry
12th March 2021
Expansive and exclusive is the paradoxical mentality of the frontier from Trump's Wall to Offa's Dyke. Can anybody live on a non-existent border, and how have they done it? Owen Dudley Edwards looks deep into a line of no breadth
3rd March 2021
In both Daisy Lafarge's poetry and prose -see her 'Metaphor as Parasite' in our Hollow issue - consciousness seems to float seamlessly in a fermentation of biology and minerology. Rochelle Roberts reviews her latest poetry collection here and finds it 'full of, and without air'.
15th May 2020
Artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) was a man of many contradictions: a writer of words and a conceiver of objects, a collaborator and a fighter. Acutely conscious of the presence of history, he was witty and urbane, yet lived in rural isolation, making a barren Scots hillside into a garden and invoking his revolutionary heroes there. Greg Thomas examines his performative relations with the functionaries of the art world, and assesses the ethical worth and creative achievements Finlay worked into those bureaucratic processes apparently so devoid of artistic potential.
10th November 2019
Lithuanian poet and one time Soviet dissident Tomas Venclova visited Scotland as part of Lithuanian Days in Scotland in October and compared experiences of Union in his home country and Scotland. As we celebrate 30 years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall this week, we review his memoirs of life as a poet behind the Iron Curtain....
1st May 2014
One aspect of Scottish literature that has been receiving renewed attention is the widespread influence of Scottish writers within other cultures. From its first publication, Jean Toomer’s novel Cane (1923) has been recognized […]
‘Ní Rabhas ach Seal/ It was only a Matter of Time’ by Noah Rose