Category: Reviews

What does it mean to be marginalised? While the term itself is eschewed by some contributors, this is the question that the essay collection Just So You Know seeks to answer. What it proves is that there is no single answer. Importantly, it highlights how the ability to answer that question is highly subjective, and that […]
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Pondweed

This is a sparkling, funny novel, largely successful in honouring the complexities of late-flowering love, writes Mandy Sutter

PUBLISHED ON: 28/07/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

When pond salesman Selwyn comes home one afternoon towing his firm’s exhibition caravan and tells his ‘like-wife’ Ginny to get into the car, all she c …

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Early Twentieth-century Welsh Plays in English, Vol 1: ‘A Dirty Broth’

Chris Moss assesses how this anthology of classic plays (including Taffy by Caradoc Evans) identifies the factors that deprived Wales of a recognisable tradition of playwriting and how these three plays share themes of religion, community, identity and family

PUBLISHED ON: 28/07/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

The first volume of a two-book series devoted to Welsh writing for the theatre,  A Dirty Broth, contains the complete texts of just three plays. You m …

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Saints and Lodgers: Poems of WH Davies

Chris Moss identifies something of Newport in the original Supertramp who belonged to no poetry school

PUBLISHED ON: 28/07/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

I am the Poet Davies, William, I sin without a blush or blink: I am a man that lives to eat; I am a man that lives to drink   Thus, with the easy …

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The Estate Agent’s Daughter

Vicky MacKenzie enjoys the honesty and vim of this second collection but wishes for Rhian Edwards' poems more imaginative flights than they are offered

PUBLISHED ON: 28/07/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Confessional and accessible, Rhian Edwards’ second collection is predominantly grounded in the everyday vocabulary of lived experience. Her themes inc …

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The Secret Glory

Issy Rixon on an early twentieth-century Gothic coming-of-age novel about nonconformity, nature, art and keeping your beliefs secret

PUBLISHED ON: 22/07/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Arthur Machen’s The Secret Glory is a dark Gothic fantasy that has everything from breaking school rules to searching for the Holy Grail. Originally w …

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Insomnia

Lee Tisdale admires a novella, published complete with its own censorship history, satirising Soviet rule in Latvia

PUBLISHED ON: 30/06/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Alberts Bels’ accessible and compelling novella Insomnia depicts Soviet-era Latvia through the eyes of Mr Eduards Dārziņš. This man allows a fleeing w …

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The Shaking City

Oliver Heath enjoys a poetry collection which addresses the pitfalls of memorialisation, memory and history

PUBLISHED ON: 30/06/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Many of us find ourselves reflecting on the past with a certain fondness as we head towards uncertain times. There is an absolute quality to history, …

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Under the Stars: A Journey into Light

What starts as a roam across Britain and between shade and night, soon becomes, Alex Diggins concludes, an impressive polemic on the need to preserve darkness and hold back the encroachment of artificial light

PUBLISHED ON: 30/06/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Years ago, somewhere between childhood and maturity, I took to night walking. We lived at that time in a village on the edge of the Somerset countrysi …

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Suicide Machine

Tim Cooke on a photography book of Bridgend which is about people and places that exist, unknowable, beyond the headlines

PUBLISHED ON: 30/06/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

It’s just over a decade since I first met the photographer Dan Wood. I was gathering footage for a student film about creativity in our hometown, Brid …

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