Ashes of the Amazon
by Milton Hatoum
Bloomsbury,
Paperback; 274 pages,
ISBN 9780747596721
Price £8.99
translated from the Portuguese by John Gledson
Dan Eltringham
Set in Manaus, capital of Brazil’s Amazona region, Ashes of the Amazon evokes place and milieu far removed from the contextual touchstones of European literary fiction, while being at once predominantly concerned with one of the European novel’s great themes: the value of art, the worth of being an artist, and the thorny problem of whether an artistic life is one insulated from other kinds of social responsibility.
The novel’s main strength is its very …

NOTHING LIKE LOVE
by Jenny Joseph
Enitharmon Press, 2009
48 pages
ISBN: 978-1-904634-84-3
Price: £9.99
Rory Waterman
A warning, of sorts: this is a very short book, an extremely slim slim vol. Poems appear on only forty-two of its pages, very few of which fall further than part of the way down one page. Moreover, there is not a great deal of new work here. Many of the poems were in Joseph’s Selected Poems (1992) and some were published in book form as recently as 2000 in All the Things I See. For this is a compendium …

BEHOLD
by Nicki Jackowska
Enitharmon Press, Paperback; 80 pages,
ISBN 978-1-904634-85-0
Price £9.99

Gordon Weetman
“[D]o not ask the perfect sentence of me,” Jackowska warns in the early pages of Behold. This is not a defence of faulty grammar, but an appeal against anything contrived or mechanistic in verse: “let not the march of logic / sour my curves nor explanations / catapult my tongue into monotonous / tickings of a metronome.”

No danger here of falling into such rationalistic traps. Jackowska’s poetry is a thing of wild magic, full of arcane images that seem to …

THE LACUNA
by Barbara Kingsolver
Faber and Faber, Hardback; 507 pages
ISBN: 9780571252633
Price £18.99
Rachel Harris

From the author of The Poisonwood Bible comes another gargantuan read: an elegant epistolary novel, recounting one man’s struggle for artistic freedom. Sprawling over two decades – from revolution in 1930s Mexico to McCarthyism in 1940s Carolina – so intricate and immersive is Barbara Kingsolver’s narrative that a review feels like a near insurmountable task. But then difficulty and reconstruction are inherent challenges in a novel riddled with holes – lacunae which are both its strength and weakness. ‘The …

Eley Williams
We tug along the cats’ eyes, thinking of you.
Below us the roadkill is a pheasant rainbowfaced, and the radio and I
Are spaniel tenors, just bawlin’, darlin’:
Sit in on our traffic jamming.
We’ll sing you the hairpins, and the zebras, and the bottlenecks.
Crested beauties, breasted cuties; yeah, I’m-a gonna do that all day ‘til you roll those pretty amber eyes right out.
To think: all these pedestrians are allowed faces, but none of them are yours!
We got you all atomised, my piñata: we always drive singing from you,
But also, somehow, always, to …

Grace Andreacchi

He was the most beautiful old man I have ever seen. They say the face of vice is ugly, but he was the living proof that it need not always be so. I cannot tell you his precise age – he must have been three hundred years old at the time we met, but one’s first impression was of a man not much over sixty. There was a vigour in his cold eye, a statuesque immobility about his person that belied his real age. On closer acquaintance one …

The Poets’ Gulf

Nicoletta Asciuto
Did sea define the land or land the sea?
This is the question Seamus Heaney asked himself back in the Sixties while standing on the wild, sea-tormented coasts of the Aran Islands, which have challenged proudly the Atlantic Ocean and its endless waves from time immemorial.
I always think of this line by Heaney when going back in mind to the Golfo dei Poeti, that is, the Poets’ Gulf, in Liguria, Italy. Liguria is very famous for its gulfs but the Poets’ Gulf is possibly the most closed and …

Michael Perfect
As I wake up and begin, through the burn of the headache and morning light blindness, to weigh up the evidence, it would seem that as far as sticking one’s cock into complete strangers goes this has been something of a relative success. I feel certain that contraception was used. A sufficient quantity of alcohol was consumed as to significantly delay but not prevent orgasm. You did not orgasm, I recall, but you seemed to enjoy yourself before you fell asleep and you did not vomit on me, which …

Legend of a Suicide
by David Vann
Penguin, Paperback; 230 pages,
ISBN 978-0-141-04378-4
Price £7.99
Gordon Weetman
David Vann’s debut is a disquieting work, both in atmospheric terms and in the way it challenges the reader to rethink their approach to literature. Perched uneasily between novel, memoir and short story collection, Legend of a Suicide is a fictional retelling of a real-life tragedy that shaped the author’s past.
Vann’s father killed himself when Vann was thirteen, and it is this death that forms the focal point of the book – a gravitational centre orbited by linked yet …