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John SearsReviews
The White Cities: Reports from France 1925-39 by Joseph RothIf France is the dead, Germany is the stillborn future, and Roth's exile's life the displaced, unliveable present. [16 November 2004] 
The School of Night by Anne RouseEach poem is located within a wider structure that organises the collection as a whole, which offers a nocturnal sequence of instruction stretching from dusk till dawn, a poetic long night's journey into day. [3 November 2004] 
Mischief Night - New & Selected Poems by Roddy LumsdenHis poems are costly, hard-worked monuments to his own internal struggle, jagged, often irregular chunks of language. [10 August 2004] 
W. G. Sebald - A Critical Companion by J. J. Long and Anne WhiteheadSebald's writings address memory as a structure of experience, and as a series of metaphors through which he tries to understand history and the responsibilities with which it burdens the present. [20 July 2004] 
The Hollywood Dodo by Geoff NicholsonThe Hollywood Dodo itself is a film script, a mechanical reproduction of the extinct bird, a few corpses, fragments of a novel -- in fact a multitude of interlinked things. [22 June 2004] 
Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia by John GilmoreElizabeth Short exists now as an image, the victim of what Gilmore calls 'crime as a spectacular act'. [15 June 2004] 
The Language of Sharks by Pat MacEnultyThe stories wear their pop culture on their sleeves, critically contrasting with the existential longings expressed by the various characters. [11 May 2004] 
The Night of Akhenaton: Selected Poems by Ágnes Nemes NagyThe key themes of history as closure, a kind of irreversible process sealed by death into a possibility of resurrection, are never far away in Nagy's poetry. [20 April 2004] 
Demonized by Christopher FowlerAll this is in the way of arguing that, in the hands of a writer like Fowler, the short story affords space for the exploration of contemporary fears. [9 March 2004] 
Oracle Night by Paul AusterIt provokes such interrogation in a way that other novels don't, as if we can legitimately expect so much more from a writer who consistently delivers less, and who has made the theme of 'lessness' his own defining quality. [24 February 2004] 
Forced March by Miklós Radnóti, translated by George Gömöri and Clive WilmerOne of the functions of poetry is to express the unthinkable mixture of the horrific, the tragic and the banal that constitutes such a biography. The remarkable power of Radnóti's poems is that they succeed, repeatedly, in doing so. [9 February 2004] 
The Book of Repulsive Women and Other Poems by Djuna BarnesBarnes writes in a curiously anachronistic style, in which content jars against form, as if children's nursery rhymes were refilled with material purged by centuries of prurient censorship, and made vibrant, living things again. [28 January 2004] 
Mailman by J. Robert LennonMailman's double life offers a penetrating critique of American social hypocrisy, embroiled in its own weird narrative, reluctant to respond to much outside of itself, and forced, eventually, to go on the run in search of escape from itself and the world it has made. [12 January 2004] 
Collected Poems 3: Poems 1997-2003 by Peter ReadingReading invites the reader into a poetic world where the contemplation of natural beauty is an imperative in the face of its imminent destruction at the hand of man. [19 December 2003] 
Eagles and Angels by Juli ZehThe real states here, though, are states of mind, and in particular those freaked-out mental states that characterise the tradition of drug-trade books and films from Burroughs to Welsh. [22 October 2003] 
Scenes From a Long Sleep: New & Collected Poems by Peter DidsburyHe writes in the long tradition of the English eccentric, weirdly both inhabiting and residing somewhere outside of normal reality. [25 September 2003] 
Who Sleeps with Katz by Todd McEwenTodd McEwen's new novel positively pulsates with vigorous life, which is odd, as superficially it's a novel about dealing with the knowledge of death. [11 September 2003] 
Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 by Barry MacSweeneyHis [Barry MacSweeney] is a poetry of extreme suffering, of Eliot's 'infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing'. [13 August 2003] 
The Wave and Other Stories by Caren GussoffCaren Gussoff's short stories map feminine experience of contemporary reality from the inside, and offer jolting rides through disturbed, damaged lives and minds. Her fictional worlds are fractured by emotional pain, criss-crossed by barely-healed scar tissue, gnarled and knotted by frustrated desires and thwarted ambitions. [24 July 2003] 
Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna FunderFunder presents what is essentially a journalistic narrative in the style of a fictional one, so that characters and thematic threads link up to elaborate deeper symbolic significances. [26 June 2003] 
Fields Away by Sarah WardleWardle plays games with rhyme, resting content with near- or para-rhyme. [3 June 2003] 
In Defence of Adultery by Julia CopusCopus is above all a poet of enquiry and careful scrutiny, using conceits of almost metaphysical intensity to trigger the reader's curiosity. [14 May 2003] 
All Day Permanent Red - War Music Continued by Christopher LogueOffers a timely and wholly appropriate meditation on the historical recurrence of war as a fundamental human activity. [30 April 2003] 
Things You Should Know by A. M. Homes[It] bespeaks a surreal, slightly menacing world of private paranoia into which intrudes relentless, threatening forces of randomness, contingency, accident. [15 April 2003] 
Glory Goes and Gets Some by Emily CarterThe reader is softly insinuated into a world where everything slips out of kilter. [2 April 2003] 
Pandora’s Handbag: Adventures in the Book World by Elizabeth YoungElizabeth Young is ultimately a book lover's reviewer rather than a conventional industry hack. [19 March 2003] 
About Schmidt by Louis BegleyOffers an important meditation on the enduring meanings of age, maturity and experience in a world increasingly devoted to the brevity of youth. 
The Honey Gatherers: A Book of Love Poems by Maura DooleyThe best love poetry (and there's a lot of it in this book) achieves this mingling of the solid and the intellectual. [26 February 2003] 
Hex by Carol RumensPrayer is both necessary as a palliative, and impossible as a luxury, an indulgence implicitly no longer available to us. [22 January 2003] 
Prince of Lost Places by Kathy HepinstallHepinstall's writing comes inflated by high praise. [15 January 2003] 
Lighter than Air—Moral Poems by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, translated by David ConstantineThings that seem 'lighter than air' can carry secretly within them vast potential weights of human suffering and catastrophe. [11 December 2002] 
Flame Tree - Selected Poems by Kevin HartHart is a poet of consistent themes, whose work becomes (in this arrangement) structured around a systematic and co-ordinated series of repetitions. 
Aftershocks - The End of Style Culture by Steve BeardThe great strength of this book is its taut, crystal-clear style. [6 November 2002] 
In the Metro by Marc AugéRiding the metro is...a journey taken in accompanied solitude, a voyage through space and through a kind of geographically mapped collective unconscious. [30 October 2002] Pleased to See Me: 69 Very Sexy Poems by Neil Astley (ed.)Neil Astley has collected together a sequence of poems that represent the range of ways that modern poets have addressed the questions of love, sex and their place in poetry. [16 October 2002] 
Portrait of My Lover as a Horse by Selima HillWords revel in their incongruous, promiscuous juxtapositions, and sentences begin sensibly and end in bewildering confusions of logic . . . [25 September 2002] 
Shed: Poems 1980-2001 by Ken SmithSmith is a poet of voices, a ventriloquist in writing, drawing on the ancient traditions of balladeers, troubadors, and wandering poets. [28 August 2002] 
Alan Ayckbourn: Grinning at the Edge by Paul AllenThe reader is left with a strong sense of the often violent pressures that build up in situations demanding extreme commitment for little financial reward, and how these pressures can affect individuals as well as teams of people. [31 July 2002] 
Staying Alive: real poems for unreal times by Neil Astley (editor)This new anthology from Bloodaxe is a marvel of editorial skill and taste, offering 500 modern poems by diverse writers as a demonstration of the efficacy of poetry in the modern world. [24 July 2002] Faunal by Peter ReadingHis misanthropy is always legitimised by a political motivation (in the case of this book, a kind of anarchic eco-awareness), so it never quite veers into the ranting to which it nevertheless approximates. [27 June 2002] 
Something for the Ghosts by David ConstantineThese poems are populated by the dead, the silent, the voiceless and the absent ... [19 June 2002] 
Ordnung & Eccentricity by Thomas ManssIt's a beautifully produced advertisement for the product it is marketing -- the company that produced it. [5 June 2002] 
The Heavy-Petting Zoo by Clare PollardClare Pollard's poems compulsively re-enact the reaching out to life and the withdrawing in pain. 
The White Family by Maggie GeeMaggie Gee's eighth novel continues her fictional analysis of the social problems of contemporary England, and does so with the deftness and sureness of touch that readers already familiar with her work have come to expect. [29 May 2002] 
A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy by Edwin T. Arnold & Dianne C. Luce, eds.In the 1990s, this community of McCarthy fans extended its territory into the world of the American academy with the establishment of something called, in this volume, 'McCarthy studies', practised by a weird enclave of literary critics and pop cultural historians who, judging by the essays here, are immersed in the intricacies of their intellectual obsession. [1 January 1995] |
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