Poem Of The Week: Anthem By Kirun Kapur

Anthem Love begins in a country Where oranges weep sweetness And men piss in the street. Your hands are forever binding Black strands in a plait. Your mother’s Childhood friend has steeped Your skin in coconut oil, tucked Her daughter beside you – the night Is a womb, live with twins. Heat’s body presses every body.

Poem Of The Week: Owl By George Macbeth (1932-1992)

Owl Is my favourite. Who flies like a nothing through the night, who-whoing. Is a feather duster in leafy corners ring-a-rosy-ing boles of mice. Twice you hear him call. Who is he looking for? You hear him hoovering over the floor of the wood. O would you be gold rings in the driving skull if you could? Hooded and vulnerable by the winter suns owl looks.

An Extraordinary Life: Three Things About Elsie By Joanna Cannon

But Ronnie Butler is dead! Florence Claybourne lives in an assisted-living home for the elderly and Florence, or Flo to her friends, has fallen. The hours tick by as she lies alone in her flat and thinks about events both in the distant past and the recent. Florence is ‘on probation’.

Poem Of The Week: An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump By Ali Lewis

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump Is a recreation, revised again by Wright, with the lark replaced by a grey cockatiel, witnesses repainted with faces of patrons, and the philosopher borrowed from a study by Frye, so the dim observers, who weren’t there, can’t have seen it open one moonlit wing as the pressure fell as if the last thing it felt was it felt like flying. Ali Lew…

Defying Gravity: Variety Turns By Christopher Arksey

The title of Christopher Arksey’s new pamphlet for Broken Sleep Books gently ironises the elegiac nature of his poems. A backward glance to a life well-lived, Variety Turns extrapolates alternative meanings from the suggestion of a theatrical playbill to describe, instead, the many faces of his subject, his mother, who died in 2016.

What A Tangled Web: Wartime For The Chocolate Girls By Annie Murray

I am a self-professed chocolate and cream queen. Chocolate in all its forms never disappoints but for me, king of the crop has always been Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, with Fruit and Nut as its Consort. That Edward Cadbury’s aim, as articulated in 1953, was to make the Cadbury village of Bourneville ‘a happy place’, comes as no surprise.

Poems And Pressed Flowers: The Botanist By M. W. Craven

I know my faults. I can be greedy. I would rather have no chocolate at all than limit myself to just one square from the bar; give me a good book and I like nothing better than to read at every possible moment, getting acquainted with the characters and immersing myself in the action.

Poem Of The Week: Rolling News Blues By John Cooper Clarke

Rolling News Blues BBC – the daily Guardian - you choose This misery soup is on a loop Rolling news blues There’s nice people doing nice things Most of the time I can’t prove it but you gotta believe me You wouldn’t hear it on the public dime BBC – the daily Guardian - you choose Deep concern could only earn you the Rolling news blues There’s never been a better time to be…

The Aestheticised Obscene: Dirty Books By Barry Reay & Nina Attwood

Barry Reay and Nina Attwood’s compelling enquiry into the murky publishing world of the early to mid-twentieth century uncovers several complex truths regarding motive and reward.

Leeds Lit Fest 2024: 15th – 23rd June

Leeds Lit Fest is back for its 6th year! Festival organisers are delighted by the city’s support they have received over the last 5 years and aim to make this an engaging and inspirational festival filled with all things literary and a whole lot more!

Poem Of The Week: Prayer By George Herbert (1593-1633)

Prayer Prayer, the church's banquet, Angel's age, God's breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth; Engine against the Almighty, sinner's tower, Reversèd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days world’ transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace…

Global Bestsellers And Fan Favourites Celebrated - Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival Reveals Special Guest Authors For 2024

Harrogate International Festivals has announced the Special Guests for the 2024 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, the largest and most prestigious celebration of crime fiction".

Apathy Is The Easy Choice: The Seven Skins Of Esther Wilding By Holly Ringland

A black swan falls out of the sky causing Esther Wilding to pull over, as her windscreen shatters. Having witnessed the incident, Tina Turner approaches and wants to help. Confused by this bizarre opening to a novel? I’m not surprised, but things, especially Tina Turner, are not always as they seem. Esther is on her way to her sister’s memorial. Aura walked into the sea a year ago.

Poem Of The Week: Chaudhri Sher Mobarik looks at the loch By Imtiaz Dharker

Chaudhri Sher Mobarik looks at the loch Light shakes out the dishrag sky and scatters the water with sequins. Look, hen! says my father, Loch Lomond! as if it were all his doing, as if he owned it, laird of Lomond, laird of the language.

Two Left Feet: Vicky’s Ditties By Victoria J. Parsons

It is a tribute to Bradford-born author, Vicky Parsons’, tenacity and skill that she should succeed in bringing her story, or more properly the story of her life, into the public gaze.

Poem Of The Week: Sniper By Jon Miller

Sniper In the street, tanks, rubble. Soldiers wear patterns of sand. The village a jigsaw of dust. Children in doorways hold the hands of ghosts. I sight along the muzzle buried in a hole in the air. You are small, distant. The size of a sparrow. Smaller. You have no family. Were never born. You are just a single dot of God. I crouch behind chimneys. Aerials. Satellite dishes.

Longborough Festival Opera The First 30 Years

Richard Bratby has had a busy time. Having chronicled the 50th anniversary of the Academy of Ancient Music, he has turned the first 30 years of the Longborough Festival Opera into a book. It is a beautifully presented volume, as befits this annual summer opera fest.

Review: Dean Rhetoric’s Foundry Songs

Dean Rhetoric’s Foundry Songs is my first foray into dystopian poetry, and this anthology certainly features all the hallmarks of the genre. The poems open inauspiciously, never on a bright spring day with crocuses sprouting. ‘Psalm of Bandages III’ begins: ‘It’s October and the trees are cancerous’, which is about as apocalyptic as it can get.

Blow, Winds, And Crack Your Cheeks: Daniel J. Mooney’s the 14th Storm

The 14th Storm (2023) by Limerick-born author Daniel J. Mooney is an Irish eco dystopia – the first I’ve had the pleasure of reading, though I doubt there are many contenders for the title! It is 2043, and climate change has taken a turn for the worse. Violent storms are a regular feature of life, rendering much of the planet uninhabitable.

Review: Before We Go Any Further By Tristram Fane Saunders

Like a man drifting in and out consciousness, Tristram Fane Saunders’ grip on poetic theme and direction is fevered, mediated by his own susceptibility to the surreal, or to alternative landscapes that shape what he sees. More intriguing still that he should prosecute his aim in a range of bravura formal approaches whose framework can never contain the arbitrary image-making of his thinking.

Poem Of The Week: 33. By Kim Moore

33. I knew him when the summer was heavy with bees and all the flying things were thrumming in the heat. I walked with him once through How Tun woods to find the path the foxes take, and yes I saw the marks upon his arms, though I never heard him speak of pain.

Books: Refiner's Fire Richard Bratby

The Academy of Ancient Music is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, the orchestra commissioned Richard Bratby to write its history. AAM, as it is affectionately known, was the first orchestra to be set up in the UK using period instruments, and Bratby uses first-hand testimony from artists, critics, collaborators, and supporters to chart its development.

‘Remember Who You Are’: The Look By Lee Coates

Never mind the Kubrick Stare, one look from my dad was enough to fill me with terror. I will say now, he never once touched me, never hit me in anger, nor touched a hair on my head even though when I was a child, a smack was not generally considered misplaced.

Poem Of The Week: The NUM By Sarah Wimbush

The NUM I am here in your breast pocket, the size of a bus pass and the Magna Carta – been sacked for been starved for. My foundations are federations, old as the moon and lassoed to oceans.

CWA Announce Double Diamond Dagger Winners

For the first time in its 70-year history, the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) is awarding two authors its annual Diamond Dagger. Lynda La Plante and James Lee Burke are 2024’s recipients of the Diamond Dagger- the highest accolade in the genre.

Poem Of The Week: She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep By Robert Graves (1895-1985)

She tells her love while half asleep She tells her love while half asleep In the dark hours, With half-words whispered low: As earth stirs in her winter sleep And puts out grass and flowers Despite the snow, Despite the falling snow. As snowdrops and crocuses force their tentative flame through the resistless ‘green fuse’ of biological purpose, and we marvel at their indefatig…

Negotiating Family Life:The Choice By Penny Hancock

Renee Gulliver is a relationships therapist but work and family can throw up very different problems and your own family relationships are often much harder to identify and negotiate than those of strangers. As they say ‘the cobbler’s children are often the worst shod’. Outwardly, the Gullivers appear to be the perfect family and to ‘have it all’.

Poem Of The Week: Snow By Gillian Clarke

Snow We're brought to our senses, awake to the black and whiteness of world. Snow's sensational. It tastes of ice and fire. Hold a handful of cold. Ball it between your palms to throw at the moon. Relish its plushy creak. Shake blossoms from chestnut and beech, gather its laundered linen in your arms. A twig of witch hazel from the ghost-garden burns like myrrh in this room. Listen!

Between Discretion And Propriety: Date With Evil By Julia Chapman

It’s been a while. My tardy response to volume eight of Julia Chapman’s consistently high quality detective series, set in the thinly-disguised Dales market town of Bruncliffe, has been a long train coming. Though in the profoundest sense it makes no difference, because the continuum upon which her extended narrative is set will sustain critical hiatuses, such is the standard of her writing.

Crimefest 2024 Highlights

The UK’s biggest crime fiction convention returns for the 16th year in 2024, with Laura Lippman and Denise Mina as its Featured Guests. CrimeFest, sponsored by Specsavers, is hosted from 9 to 12 May 2024 at the Mercure Bristol Grand Hotel. Up to 150 authors will descend on Bristol appearing in over 50 panels.