Amy Jo Philip
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Another Book Festival excursion yesterday evening. This time, it was to hear James Lasdun and Michael Symmons Roberts read from and discuss their second and first novels respectively. Typical Book Festival weather is either warm and sunny, with festival-goers spread over the lawn of Charlotte Square, or tipping it down. Last night was the latter.…
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My first trip to this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival yesterday. I had tickets for three events, but could only make it to two of them. I couldn’t make it to the poetry translation workshop with George Szirtes, which was the event I had really wanted to attend, but I managed to pass my ticket…
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In case you hadn’t noticed, the Booker longlist is out and the media have begun their febrile speculation as to who will win the prize. (They never do that with the Forward shortlist, now, do they?) The BBC upholds journalistic standards by reporting on the bookies’ odds rather more than the books, but The Guardian…
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Several weeks ago, I finally managed to visit Little Sparta, the late Ian Hamilton Finlay‘s garden. Finlay was a man of unique vision and creativity. With his collaborators, he transformed the bare land of Stoneypath farm into a poet-artist’s garden, in which everything–the land, the buildings, the plants, the installations–is shaped according to a coherent…
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I have just this afternoon discovered that Alasdair Gray has a website. As anyone who knows Gray’s books would expect, it is illustrated in his distinctive style. It also contains poetry, plays, interviews, biliographies and a fragment of a storyboard for an “intended screenplay” of Gray’s most famous novel, Lanark. Gray also has a blogspot.…
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Does anybody know of, or have any good ideas for, a noun for a gathering of monostiches? “Sequence” seems somewhat overblown. My only thought so far is a “seam” …
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Several weeks ago, my wife picked up the booklet that accompanied this list and poll. I pretty much ignored it when it was current last year, as lists like that tend to annoy me. (The idea strikes me as unimaginative and not a particularly useful way to assess whatever is being ranked. And I don’t…
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Apologies for the absence of any updates to this blog over the past wee while. We’ve been without a phone line and, therefore, internet access at home since Tuesday. It’s still not working, so I’m doing this from my work computer (in my lunch hour, I hasten to add). According to the BT workmen we…
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I arrived home on Friday to a most pleasant, unexpected piece of post: a pamphlet containing poems from the 2005 Amnesty International poetry competition, with my winning poem in pole position. With a nice sense of cheek and irony, the pamphlet is entitled “Extraordinary Renditions”. You can purchase it from Anthea West, the secretary of…
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I have just discovered that a colleague of mine has a rather intriguing blog, entitled “More than you needed to know“.
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On Thursday evening, I was at the launch of The Testament of Gideon Mack, the new novel by James Roberston–novelist, poet, non-fiction author, founder of Kettilonia press and, with Matthew Fitt, driving force behind the marvellous Itchy Coo project. The venue, Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, was jam packed with figures from the Scottish literatary world–I caught…
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Well, Ottakar’s is definitely to be swallowed by the dog, not that I held out much hope that anything else would be the outcome. “Support your local booksellers!” must be the rallying cry. I’m not averse to buying books online, but these days I’m more inclined to find out about a book online and order…
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We were in Wigtown a week past Saturday. Came away with a nice wee haul of second-hand books, including John Berryman‘s Collected Poems 1937-1971 (doesn’t include the Dream Songs, which I really want to get my teeth into at some point) and Octavio Paz‘s bilingual Collected Poems 1957-1987 edited by the translator and wonderful essayist…
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Dave Martin, who’s mentioned in this post, is about to embark on a year-long art project beginning with a trip from Egypt, through the Levant and into Eastern Europe and culminating in a show at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2007. You can follow his progress here.
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Tuesday night saw the launch of There are words, the collected poems of Gael Turnbull, who died in 2004. Gael was a doctor, morris dancer, Liberal Democrat activist and endlessly inventive poet, though I knew of only the first and last of those aspects to his life while he was with us. Gael’s publishing life…
Amy Jo Philip 