It is now several years since I did a blog post on this site, to the point where I wondered whether I should just give up the idea. As I mentioned a while back, our move to Bexhill took up a lot of headspace and although I continued with some ad hoc writing, and immensely …
Category archives: Uncategorised
Caleb Femi gives voice to the unheard in “Poor”
Poet and film-maker Caleb Femi, Young People’s Laureate for London from 2016 to 2018, grew up in Peckham, moved away then back. His debut collection, “Poor”, published by Penguin in 2020, has won deserved accolades. I am keenly aware that in commenting on this book I am entering a world with which I am totally …
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Languishing with “The Kids”
Responses to my last blog piece surprised me. As so often, it’s encouraging to find that others are sharing the same experience when you think you’re the only one going through a painful ordeal. In that serendipitous way that often occurs, a day or two after publishing it I came across the term “languishing”, which …
From desolation to hope
Casual browsers happening on this site will notice a distinct time lag since my last post. Yes, gentle reader, like so many others in this benighted country I have been in a not very good place. The obvious explanation is the after-effect of lockdown, which proved to be more traumatic than many of us realised …
A rich dystopia: J.O. Morgan’s Martians
Let me put my cards on the table at the outset: I have never been a science fiction fan, my last sampling of the genre having been about sixty years ago with John Wyndham’s Triffids. However, J.O. Morgan has come close to converting me. His book “The Martian’s Regress” manages to combine humour and invention …
“Deformations” – Sasha Dugdale
I am beginning to suffer from TS Eliot shortlist fatigue – do you know the signs? that heartsinking feeling when you open a much-heralded collection, hyped to the skies in a blurb on the back, and think to yourself on reading the first poems “WTF? I don’t understand a word of this”. At the same …
In the clouds with Shane McCrae
Of the T.S. Eliot shortlisted collections I have read so far, Shane McCrae’s “Sometimes I Never Suffered” gets the Oddball Prize for the moment. It contrasts the views of two very different characters, in different sections of the book. First, a “hastily assembled angel”: “the angels Had seen the creatures coming in the waves Then …
The Alien World of Ella Frears
Ella Frears’ collection “Shine, Darling” was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. It is divided into three sections, the central one (titled Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity) reproducing a work that appeared as a “Goldsmiths Short” pamphlet. Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity weaves a number of narratives together in a sequence of small pieces, …
A rich feast from Natalie Diaz
I remember celebrating my fiftieth birthday in the Dordogne, and ordering all my favourite things at dinner: a starter of foie gras, a main course of magret de canard with pommes dauphinoises, cheese of course and then some suitable dessert concoction that would have involved sugar, eggs and cream. Washed down, of course, with some …
Washing a Heart with Bhanu Kapil
I came to Bhanu Kapil’s collection How to Wash a Heart after it had won the T.S. Eliot Prize. I had not seen her reading it, but have now done my homework. I have watched her talk about her work in the brief video done prior to the night of the award. I have watched …