Reviews on The Review

I’ve just spent the morning with the 24-page booklet that accompanies the latest release from Manchester-based reissue masters Finders Keepers. The write-up in small print is a history of an obscure but seminal French record label that formed out of the wind-blown ashes of the May ’68 student demonstrations in Paris. It tells this via [...]

Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich,
The Belgian author Maurice Carême (1899 - 1978) is apparently much loved and seen as a major figure in his homeland. I read this volume with growing respect and a growing sense that for all their absence of obvious difficulty these were poems that would reward extensive rereading. Carême’s predilection for short [...]

Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga is a revenge tragedy set in a part of modern-day Europe so remote that people still turn the hay by hand, put strangers up for the night and where a lone woman can drive her son on a horse and cart for miles between villages. Yet it is a place [...]

To accuse a book of generosity of spirit can be to suggest rather a generosity of ego. But generosity of spirit is what comes across most with these three new volumes from Canadian publishers. There is a generosity towards the world in all three books, although the title to the book of translations, 20 [...]

Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich

Liz Almond’s new collection introduces us to a wide world, full of sensual pleasures but also of cruelties, pains and dangers which she suggests we must actively face and face down if we are to live life to the full.

“Rosita Rules the Roost” illustrates some of the strengths of [...]

Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich.

Pas revoir, Valerie Rouzeau’s brilliant sequence of poems on the death of her father, is challenging in many ways and on many levels. The linguistic demands posed by its verbal dislocations and fragmentations, its allusiveness, and multiple lexical ambiguities would have put it completely out of reach of my French if [...]

If we could travel back in time (and what good story doesn’t begin with a time machine?), pick up a few core members of the Grateful Dead, bring them and their gear forward and get them to release an album of Curtis Mayfield covers, one of the songs on that record (likely an Impressions-era [...]