Purchase: Dark Avenues (Oneworld Modern Classics) (Oneworld Classics)

Ivan Bunin is a largely forgotten writer who should be far more noticed in our reading of the Russian canon. He fled Russia after the revolution of 1917, eventually settling in France where he continued a largely celebrated writing career. In 1933 he became the first Russian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a remarkable fact for a writer who is now so little read. Hopefully this collection will change that. Dark Avenues, written between 1938 and 1944, is a masterpiece. Each short story is crafted into being a meal in itself; it is definitely a collection where one might just as easily read one story and feel replete enough to put it down as read through all forty-odd at once.

Purchase: Hidden River

Stephanie Norgate's first full-length collection of Poems, Hidden River, is an act of re-inflation. It seems to be of the past, in a mostly positive way; a form of assessment and careful reconnection. The tone and themes act to make present, or represent a desire to make present, past loves, events, tastes. This re-inflation of the past, or re-appraisal of a stalled path of development, manifests itself as important if unspecific realisations. In 'The Wheedling Man' Norgate without any fan-fare or explication connects a casual sexual relationship with forthright and demure beggars, and the ease of acquiescing to demands and the equal ease of ignoring requests and that reflecting on good intentions always missed is no substitute for actually doing the good deed.

Purchase: The Siren of Salamanca and Other Stories

It is difficult to set a story in a culture or place that you have not intimately experienced or belonged to, it is either very brave or romantically stupid, and it risks becoming a form of literary colonization.

Purchase: The Sinking Road

“Paul Batchelor comes with an enviable array of powers,” claims Sean O’Brien on the back cover of this volume of poetry, but there are no indicators in this collection of the poet having any superheroic qualities. Instead, we are treated to a collection of poems containing such variance that they build together the sum of thoughts and feelings to create, in one volume, the embodiment of being human, a single unit, solitary, observant and unconnected to its surroundings except through the fabric of the senses.

Purchase: Collected Poems

It’s as if we had found a new Gormenghast manuscript tucked away behind one of Peake’s canvases... (p.2)

Indeed, R. W. Maslen’s recent edition of Mervyn Peake’s (1911-1968) poetry presents just such a treasure. Alongside the recent study by Peake’s son Sebastian, Mervyn Peake: The Man and his Art (2006), this collection grants us the timely opportunity for a thorough reassessment of Peake’s unique literary and artist contributions, on the fortieth anniversary of his death. The BBC television series adaptation of Gormenghast (2000) directed by Andy Wilson is also acknowledged by Maslen as important in gaining a wider appreciation for his work. Comparisons with Peake’s fantasy trilogy are therefore inevitable.

Purchase:

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 Some of you may have seen the Glasgow based performance poet and comic Robin Cairns perform live. This pamphlet by Red Squirrel Press – okay, to get a moan out of the way, can they please include an index in their future publications?

Let’s start again. Cairns’s first pamphlet is built largely around material developed for his live act (indeed there is an accompanying DVD of him performing ‘Old Lochgelly’ at Glasgow’s Panopticon Music Hall) – so the question must be: how well does his material translate onto the page?

Well pretty well, mostly. Cairns adopts a colloquial Scots-English free-verse in most of the poems that will also be pretty accessible south of the border (where Red Squirrel are based), as well as presenting himself as an often bemused commentator on the modern world.

Weighing the Air

(Sub-text: this is complex, high-tech stuff.)

- Reticulating splines

 

Peter Howard is part philosopher part technocrat. At its best his work manages an interesting and enlightening melding of the two registers. At its most jarring some of these pieces risk becoming gratuitous processions of recent inventions that do nothing to expose any issue of importance, or to impact on our minds further than the normal effects of novelty. There is always something jarring about seeing the current world represented. It is why, un-courageously, we often resort to truisms and vague methods of description that burden the reader with the task of providing flavouring. When, as in these poems, the “complex, high-tech stuff” that makes up our everyday lives appears there is the difficult problem of its simultaneous instant recognition, and the unfamiliarity of its setting within literature.