Category: Reviews

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Mai by Georgia Ruth

Georgia Ruth proves in her new folk album Mai that she is on a steady upward trajectory

PUBLISHED ON: 15/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Evocation of locales that hold a personal connection to artists is a common feature in the medium of music. Rich soundscapes will frequently echo plac …

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The Man in Black. Peter Moore: Wales’ Worst Serial Killer

Chris Moss is fascinated by a book told in a level-headed narrative that trainee lawyers and police could learn from. And while trainee crime novelists should find inspiration here, it shows there is not always a ball of darkness in killers, but sometimes an empty void

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Like many crime stories, this one begins with a body – Anthony Davies, forty, found on Pensarn Beach by a dogwalker on the morning of 18 December, 199 …

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The Lives and Extraordinary Adventures of Fifteen Tramp Writers from the Golden Age of Vagabondage

Chris Moss finds that there is something romantic and true about the fourteen men and one woman who lived first, wrote afterwards, and saw in the tramping life a mode of being that was more meaningful than home-focused domestic existence

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Jim Phelan, in collection of Ian Cutler   An extensive list of words for people of no fixed abode in the introduction to this book reminds us how …

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Tiger Girl

Vicky MacKenzie lauds an eighth collection, shimmering with beauty and rage, by the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize-winning poet, a writer who refuses to flinch

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Tiger Girl shimmers with beauty and rage: for every exquisite description of a bird or tiger, there’s an incident of cruelty and horror, unfolded on t …

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Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation

Edward O Wilson, adapted by Jim Ottaviani, art by CM Butzer, colouring by Hilary Sycamore

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Edward O Wilson, as readers of the New Welsh Review will know, is one of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists, an entomologist with an unrivall …

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The Distance

Set in apartheid South Africa, this allegory of boxing, blood and brotherhood, writes Chris Moss, ripples with meanings and possibilities, is full of grace and tenderness, and demonstrates the light touch of a prose master

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Great boxing matches are ‘allegories authored in blood’, wrote Budd Schulberg. It’s quoted late on in Ivan Vladislavíc’s sixth novel, which, among oth …

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The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country

Ted Parry concludes that this book on periphery and centre deserves a place on the bookshelves of any historian concerned with England, and that Tom Hazeldine’s reshaping of ‘the Northern Question’ will dominate how Wales comes to be governed

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

The Northern Question is the opening shot of a campaign to place the North-South divide back at the centre of thinking about England. Belying its orig …

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Wild Persistence

Vicky MacKenzie admires a poetry collection of humour and revelry, lit by the repeated flare of violence and warmed by the unapologetic need to live the life of one’s own choosing

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

From the very first line, ‘A joy of noise’, there’s humour and revelry in Katrina Naomi’s third full-length collection. There’s pleasure taken in a lo …

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Barry Island: The Making of a Seaside Playground c1790–1965

How Penarth beat Biarritz Barry. Chris Moss traces the posh eighteenth-century roots of the working-class resort

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Some British seaside resorts double as lazy jokes. Skegness, Blackpool and Clacton-on-Sea are names that trip off the tongue when there’s chatter abou …

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Art for Wales: The Legacy of Derek Williams

Although at times a little scanty, Laura Wainwright concludes that this lavishly illustrated coffee-table book on the art collection of a philanthropist perhaps more important than the Gregynog Davies sisters, is generous, beautiful and important

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

According to John Berger, when we see a work of art, ‘We leave it, carrying away in our consciousness something which we didn’t have before…. What we …

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