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New Dawn Fades – Matt Merritt’s Making the Most of the Light
Buy Troy Town from Arrowhead Press Prague Trail (Photo credit: Artbandito) Looking at the turnout for the support act’s set, I’m reminded of a wispy comb-over. As ever, the consumer knows best and art...
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Matthew Stewart’s Inventing Truth
Sunday local conker fight (Photo credit: Nikki Pugh) In the family album there’s a snap of a tiny boy pressing his gift of a Matchbox car into the romper-suited torso of his new baby brother. The...
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In vino veritas – Matthew Stewart’s Tasting Notes
Only someone who follows no football can understand the feelings of confusion and fear that accompany the convergence of their personal diary and a major fixture. I’d just moved to teach English in a...
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Time of No Reply – Fiona Moore’s The Only Reason for Time
BLW Telegram Table (Photo credit: Wikipedia) When my phone buzzed on that July morning, its screen read SOMETHING’S HAPPENED. DON’T WORRY. I’M OK. The brevity of text messages usually adds to their...
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Beautiful Strange – Chrissy Williams’ Flying Into the Bear
Demonstration outside a fast food restaurant (Photo credit: peoplesworld) It’s just easier to think in shorthand. Certain brands – political, commercial, or artistic, trigger knee-jerk love, or...
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Full fathom five – Richie McCaffery’s Spinning Plates
The ACME Thunderer (Photo credit: ge’shmally) On clearing my great aunt’s house, my parents presented me with her ACME Thunderer. She was a teacher from the old school, and I can imagine her, the...
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Tasting Notes – poems by Matthew Stewart
Matthew Stewart’s excellent pamphlet, Tasting Notes, has now been professionally produced as a short film. One of Matthew’s hopes was that the pamphlet would introduce poetry to a new audience, and...
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Pamphlet power
The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 2013 Programme If you’re accessing the Aldeburgh Festival blog through my personal blog, then I’ll keep posting links to it here. This afternoon we were treated to four...
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Act of Remembrance – Tom Duddy’s The Years
Swindon: The Magic Roundabout (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Roundabouts are disorientating – the work of the devil – and often I’ll have to orbit in a holding pattern to get my bearings. Recently, in a...
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My bloody valentine – Richard Osmond’s Shill
Fleas dressed as Mexican Dancers, Natural History Museum at Tring, 1905 (Photo credit: clive.flint) I’ll not succumb to the radiation emanating from the cultural Chernobyl that is Disneyland Paris...
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Counting the Stars: Richard Osmond’s Variant Air
Curtal sonnet on the curtal sonnet In crystal, snowflakes, frost, a tight-furled sunflower’s spiral of hulls, a floret of broccoli’s fractal beauty, such arrays and iterations! O baroque...
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Jo Field’s The Anglesey Leg
George Jones, The Village of Waterloo, 1821 (Photo credit: Waterloo 200 – all rights reserved) Watching the Sky journalist, Colin Brazier, picking through a suitcase at the crime scene / crash site of...
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Dream Attack: Fiona Moore’s Night Letter
Black and white lights corridor indoors (Photo credit: pexels.com) I was once awoken in the dead of night by the kitchen knives. Not by the cutlery but the other knives. At least, I later attributed...
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Helena Nelson’s How (Not) to Get your Poetry Published
You’ve never seen a soul playing football. You never read about it. You are unaware of its rules, or even of the fact that it’s a team game. Yet, intent upon a professional career, you travel to Old...
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I’m a Bitch – David Kinloch’s Some Women
This morning, I’m thrilled to fill the guest blogger slot on Anthony Wilson’s poetry blog, where I write about the Renaissance poet, Aemilia Lanyer. Her indignant refusal to roll over and take it like...
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Back to Black -Charlotte Gann’s Noir
Setting the tropes of film noir aside for a moment, Raymond Chandler’s iconic sleuth, Philip Marlowe, feels more like Eliot’s Tiresias: knowing and foresuffering all, peeling back the cheap tin lid on...
View ArticleLet’s talk about sex, baby – Jennifer Copley’s Some Couples
Suede’s debut single, ‘The Drowners’, enacts a war between Butler’s masculine, strident rhythm guitar and the androgyny of Anderson’s lyrics and vocal delivery: ‘We kiss in his room to a popular tune...
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Piercing the Veil: Fiona Moore’s The Distal Point
Ken Currie, Three Oncologists (Professor RJ Steele, Professor Sir Alfred Cuschieri and Professor Sir David P Lane of the Department of Surgery and Molecular Oncology, Ninewells Hospital, Dundee), 2002,...
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Pure Heroine – Rachel Piercey’s Disappointing Alice
Social media, we are told, defines who girls want to be – or at least who they want to look like. Earlier this year, The Telegraph reported that ‘6% of girls aged 13 to 16 – equivalent to more than...
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