Friday 1 November 2013

Reviews round-up



Above, multiplying crushed beer cans. Yesterday I heard someone on radio quote Richard Burton on critics: ‘eunuchs at the orgy’. Irrelevancies over, a little flurry of newsprint:

In this week’s TLS, John Greening on J. O. Morgan’s At Maldon: ‘The energy never flags, and there is considerable intensity of language … many passages where the combined forces of old and new are exhilaratingly persuasive.’

In yesterday’s Morning Star, Andy Croft on Dan O’Brien’s War Reporter: ‘It is partly a book about modern war, partly a book about the responsibility of news-media in making sense of the atrocities and absurdities of wars waged in our name. The book compels the reader to watch the poet watching the photographer watching what no one should ever see … Above all, it is a book about the terrible responsibility of the war photographer.’

In The North, Edmund Prestwich on Beverley Bie Brahic’s White Sheets: ‘She shares [Elizabeth] Bishop’s flair for presenting the mind in the act of thinking by verbalising the subtle evolutions of though, the false trials and associative leaps through which it reacts to the world.’

In tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph, a short piece on Alba Arikha, author of Soon, with a photograph of the author aged four in company with Samuel Beckett: ‘When I was born he bought me the most elegant pram and the largest teddy bear in Paris, according to my mother.’ On Wednesday, 13 November, from 7 pm. Alba Arikha will be reading, singing too, at Book & Kitchen, 31 All Saints Road, London W11 1HE.

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