Tag: humour

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 long train journey after attending a poetry reading: ‘I felt enchanted with ideas, / neurons sparking towards each other.’ There’s pleasure in sex: ‘this honest enjoyment and need’, pleasure in clifftop […]
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Well-laid Hedges and Cider

Jim Pratt failed all his exams and was gently advised by his father to get a job. He recalls his first forestry posting at Osbaston, near the council’s rubbish tip in Monmouth, in 1960

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Memoir

‘Coming to Mrs Wallet’s?’ Tom Johns was lighting his bicycle lamp, shielding the rather damp match that he had taken from a small tin and struck on hi …

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Lest We Forget

Wanda Zyborska writes about HM Stanley, Denbigh, memorialisation and art, asking, How can we have equality without diversity in our cultural representations?

PUBLISHED ON: 28/07/20

CATEGORY: Column, Opinion

The recent actions of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters tearing down statues of the slave owner Edward Colston in Bristol has drawn public attention …

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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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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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Pravda Ha Ha

Jemma L King is intrigued by this exploration, comic in parts, in which a return to Russia 30 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, reveals the rise of the Right and how the little guy was shafted in the interim, and the stupid became unjustifiably wealthy

PUBLISHED ON: 02/03/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Jemma L King is intrigued by this exploration, comic in parts, in which a return to Russia 30 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, reveals the r …

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Parch (series 2)

Dewi Huw Owen on series 2 in the comic drama series ('Wales' riposte to The Vicar of Dibley') by Fflur Dafydd, set in Carmarthenshire

PUBLISHED ON: 19/02/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

The second series of the S4C drama, Parch, came to a hauntingly ambiguous end two Sundays ago, having delighted audiences for eight weeks with its fin …

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No Good Brother

Suzy Ceulan Hughes

PUBLISHED ON: 27/07/18

CATEGORY: Reviews

The opening paragraph of Tyler Keevil’s third novel draws the reader in immediately: The end of the story is pretty well known, since people wound up …

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Bad Ideas/Chemicals by Lloyd Markham

Eluned Gramich

PUBLISHED ON: 30/01/18

CATEGORY: Reviews

‘Some authors try to do weird. Some writers write weird. Lloyd Markham is weird.’ When I read Chris Meredith’s recommendation of this début novel, I a …

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