The title sets the tone for this, the last novel of the Song Cycle Quartet and the opening pages continue the nostalgic feel with a Raymond Chandler style narration: Philip Marlowe seems to be still alive and kicking, albeit in Hull.
Leo Rivers, a Private Investigator, is employed by local businessman, Ray Dixon, to deliver £10k in used notes, to a blackmailer, in return for ‘the rest of a roll of film’ – photos of his daughter. It is supposed to…
Sneak
Age comes, and then
infirmity, not beating
on the door with knotty
stick, announcing its
arrival with due pomp
and medication, but
insinuating noxious
vapours into lung and heart,
round knee and hip, curling
through the brain like smoke,
invisible yet choking with
an acrid autumn smell.
Irish poet, Geraldine Mitchell’s poem speaks to those of us of certain years for whom age is gradually withering our physical presence, either in appearance or internal function, or both. The process is cruel: ‘Sneak’ is an apposite term for the slyness of decline,…
It is easy to be misled by the titles of Katie Oliver’s short stories: archly simple, the received effect is diversionary, inclined to blindside the reader towards satisfying conventional expectations. And up to a point they do, like bottles of HP Sauce, describe their contents.
But Oliver’s universe is surreal, fetid, and teeming with organic purpose, as though to reify the intrinsic meaning of the title tenfold, to make an irony of its apparent directness. ‘Together we Grow’, a dark excursion…
At the City Gates
When the city gates open, dreams flood out, like dockers on
bicycles when the four o’clock siren sings freedom, oiled chains
whirring like bees. It’s been an age since anything worked, but
there are grooves worn in blistered tarmac that you can see if
you kick away the residue from the last high tide, and when you
drop the needle the whole world spins like a charity shop album,
playing a song everyone danced to when you were a teenager,
though not…
This novel has found its way to the top of the ever-increasing pile by the bed. I hadn’t even noticed it but when it appeared, it was one of those I couldn’t ignore. I love good historical fiction and this didn't disappoint, although it is not a cosy read for a winter’s night. Much has been written, both fiction and faction, about the persecution of the Jews in the years prior to World War Two, and it was on 27…
In J. A. Baker’s dazzling work of nature writing, The Peregrine (1967), the first encounter with a bird is not, surprisingly, with ‘the peregrine’, rather with a nightjar. Baker compares the nightjar’s song to wine.
Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day it would seem thinner and drier,…
Behind Closed Doors
'This profession requires an unruffled temper…'
Titian, d. 1556 of plague
Night in the nation’s gallery,
an avenue of over-branching canvases
walked only by security:
Andromeda in chains, Callisto
exiled to the silent universe – the gods,
their overworld, their club.
Outside, contagion’s on the streets
again, bent on self-replication. Tomorrow
they’ll let us enter one by one,
insist we keep our distance as Actaeon
might have learned who strayed too near
Diana, perfect android, immortal machine.
Not something he could have imagined,
an afternoon in the forest, his flesh
transformed, his body…
The title of Irish writer Jim McElroy’s remarkable recent pamphlet for smith|doorstop does much to corroborate that sense of unanimity with the natural world that is a prevailing feature of his poetic métier. As mood darkens in accordance with a rural landscape that is sodden, encloistered in sepulchral light and mostly resistant to aesthetic considerations, our thoughts turn, perhaps too readily, to the black hills of R. S. Thomas’ godless breed of Welsh upland farmer. And if there is thin…
Leeds Lit Fest is back! Returning for its fifth year, the city’s award-winning festival of words and thought will take place across a diverse range of the city’s venues and aims to bring together, and help develop, the city’s literary scene, with writers, poets and performers from the UK and beyond. This year’s festival is supported by Leeds 2023, the citywide celebration of culture which launched on Saturday, and will interweave themes of untold stories, radical acts, playful adventures and…
January
The fox drags its wounded belly
Over the snow, the crimson seeds
Of blood burst with a mild explosion
Soft as excrement, bold as roses.
Over the snow that feels no pity,
Whose white hands can give no healing,
The fox drags its wounded belly.
The Anglican priest of the Welsh hills who gave laconic succour to dying farmers and to remote congregations offers little of hope or redemption in this short, powerful poem of winter’s unforgiving and brutal landscape. The poetry of R. S. Thomas…
Forgotten histories! Today, much is made of the past, often about the atrocities perpetrated by colonialists. These stories should never be ignored or forgotten although times were different, expectations were different and actions which are thought abhorrent today, were accepted as normal. We cannot change history and should not try to rewrite it but it is my belief that we should learn from these stories and ensure that such maltreatment, such behaviour, is not repeated. The end of The Attic…
Whose ‘Oblivion’? Is the ‘Act’ a form of action performed by a person? Is it a euphemism for murder?
We soon find out as Robert Harris’ tale unfolds. He must be so grateful to the Parliament of 1660 for giving him such a theatrical title for his new novel. Perhaps royalties are due.
Just in case you were unaware of events following the English Civil War and the subsequent Restoration, the Act of Oblivion pardoned those who had fought as Republicans, except…
Gillian Godden describes herself as ‘an Indie author and a full time NHS Key worker at a local inner city medical centre in East Hull, East Yorkshire’. Her first novel Dangerous Games was published in 2019 and the first two books in her latest Diamond series arrived on the shelves in 2022. The p.ublished group of online newspapers recently caught up with her:
Do you have a particular time and place to write?
Writing usually depends on when the plot comes to…
Promise
Remember, the time of year
when the future appears
like a blank sheet of paper
a clean calendar, a new chance.
On thick white snow
You vow fresh footprints
then watch them go
with the wind’s hearty gust.
Fill your glass. Here’s tae us. Promises
made to be broken, made to last.
Measured by any metric, 2022 has been a pretty dreadful year. And if the sheet of ‘thick white snow’ in Jackie Kay’s hopeful poem is a serviceable metaphor for a fresh start, or annual resetting of approach, I…
Diamond Geezer is not a title you would expect to transport you to a turf war in the tenements of Glasgow but then Nick Diamond is no ordinary chap.
A handsome, successful and charismatic lawyer with well-cut suits and plenty of silk shirts, he is admired, envied and feared in equal measure. He lives in Chelsea with his wife, Patsy. It’s a long, long way from the run down estate in Glasgow where lie his family roots. He commands respect…
Christmas
The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.
The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that the villagers can say
"The church looks nice" on…
Femlandia is the third novel by US author Christina Dalcher, and her third within the subgenre of feminist dystopian literature.
In the wake of an economic crash, our beleaguered protagonist, Miranda, and her daughter Emma are forced to take to the road, their house and everything in it having been sold off, leaving with barely the clothes on their backs and a couple of rucksacks containing basic provisions for survival. In scenes similar to Susannah Wise’s Fragile Earth, published but a…
One of the many intriguing things about Chasing Clouds, a fine new anthology of children’s poems, is the protean capacity of several of its contributors to make connections with adult readers. Which is as it should be: kids are embryonic adults, or rather, adults will retain vestiges of childhood sensibilities throughout life. Harry Potter transcends boundaries of reception precisely because J.K. Rowling has created a universe of magical suggestion that is balm to the need for escape in children of…
Memory
For Joyce Ashuntangtang
Just before dawn when the city bleeds,
the poet undresses in the dark and writes.
Witness, she pushes herself to tell
of prison cells and sharpened guillotines,
of how she sees thieves with cloaks and daggers,
their faces hanging on posters and billboards.
When the city bled, in the reddening dawn,
she saw the children, her children.
They were many and feeding on garbage
in bins and gutters, hungry as rats.
In their eyes, she saw before they did
the corpses they would be tomorrow.
Eric Ngalle Charles’ fine diptych…
I have decided to exercise restraint, a bit like I try to do with chocolate, and not read all of Richard Osman’s books at once. It would be too much of a good thing and more importantly, they make a delightful diversion from some of the darker novels I find myself drawn to.
In The Man Who Died Twice, Osman’s second novel,…
Barmbrack
Mother of God,
two houseflies were making love
on what must have been their honeymoon.
My grandmother struck them with a dishcloth.
The dirty fuckers, she said,
sweeping them into her open palm
like currants falling from the barmbrack loaf
at the heart of which lay a golden ring.
The affront of the grandmother figure in Barmbrack is a gentle infusion of humour in a vignette whose celebratory tone does for the thought of a freshly-baked fruit loaf what William Carlos Williams did for the irresistible allure of…
Observing the plaids and pleats of the contents of Sylvia Plath’s closet at Bonham’s auction sale room, academic Gail Crowther is struck by the potency of these ‘objects of the dead’, invested with an inextricable link to the ‘biography of the owner’. The ‘symbolic continuity’ they confer can only, she notes, be a shadow of that given up by a manuscript or a collection of poems, but they do introduce us to a kind of intimacy with the interior life…
Next week, 12,000 copies of a new book 'Lancashire Stories' will be distributed for free across the county.
Printed with help from UCLan Publishing, the book will be given away at libraries, museums and Lancashire Archives.
An exclusive eBook version will also be available on BorrowBox, with five additional stories - after Lancashire Day on Sunday (Nov 27)
Lancashire County Council commissioned 17 talented, professional authors to write 'Lancashire Stories', which delves into the area's people, places, heritage and mythology.
Starting from Tuesday, (November…
Like tuning in to a familiar television series, there is something comforting about reading a series of books involving the same principal characters. You get to know them, to discover their foibles and traits and they become familiar, almost friends.
So, it was with a degree of pleasurable anticipation that I picked up the third in the Song Cycle Quartet and met up once more with PI Leo Rivers and his news agency pals, Sunny and Yvonne. Having said how familiar…
Observing the plaids and pleats of the contents of Sylvia Plath’s closet at Bonham’s auction sale room, academic Gail Crowther is struck by the potency of these ‘objects of the dead’, invested with an inextricable link to the ‘biography of the owner’. The ‘symbolic continuity’ they confer can only, she notes, be a shadow of that given up by a manuscript or a collection of poems, but they do introduce us to a kind of intimacy with the interior life…
Sir Alan Ayckbourn, is arguably the country’s greatest living playwright. He is certainly the most prolific - and the majority of his plays received their premiere in Scarborough. Originally, this was in the Library Theatre, the first professional in-the-round company, which he joined in 1957 as an actor and stage manager, and from 1996 in the Stephen Joseph Theatre (SJT).
... is a marvellous miscellany of Ayckbourn’s out-takes, paths not taken, reappraisals and rejections. Both a scholarly work of reference and…
Head in the Clouds
Teacher says,
Get your head out,
Right out,
Out of the clouds.
Nothing good can come
From having a head
Stuck in the clouds,
He says.
Before I take my head
Out of the clouds
I look around,
Around at the clouds.
And I see magicians
Explorers
Adventurers
Artists
And dancers.
I see movers
And makers
Singers
Wakers
Dreaming.
In the clouds
I see mysteries for solving
Stories for telling
Challenges for taking
Lives for saving
Questions for wondering
And my head
In the clouds,
Exactly where it belongs.
I think we’ve all been there; those unavoidable occasions so mind-bogglingly boring that the only escape is to…
Colden Valley
North I’m convinced of it: childhood’s over,
in the narrow valleys in the mist the frost
is silver in the veins and edge of leaves,
and last year’s briars coppered into stone.
Then more stone dragged to quarter fields
in which the miserable lives of beasts in winter
whiten into breath. The valley pulls –
poor pasture, poorer footage, water falling.
And all its children gone through millyards
into stone they chiselled.Billy, Emma, Jack,
and gave their dates and shut the ground
in work and prayer. Or they are almost…
Living in Harrogate as I do, a number of people have mentioned the Harrogate Crime Series to me but as the books were only available on Kindle at first - not my preferred medium - I did not immediately enter the world of DCI Cyril Bennett and DI David Owen. Now regularly published in hard copy, I can sit and enjoy their investigations. This is the twelfth in the series and it seems Harrogate is as dangerous a place to…
I stagger to the counter, an armful of book packages clutched to my chest.
“Hello!” I say through the perspex slot, “It’s me again.”
Mrs Goggins in the post office leaps into action and five minutes of weighing, printing and sticking begins as postcodes and zip codes are checked. While the growing queue behind me peppers the back of my neck with darts and daggers from impatient eyes, my right ear warms considerably.
The process completed, the postage paid, I smile weakly and…