Geordismo: Review of The Book of Newcastle

Although the cities of the North East might be quiet right now under lockdown, Alice Patchett escapes into the Book of Newcastle, a collection of short stories that roams the urban environment in search of everyday, lively moments of community and place. In Julia Darling’s ‘Calling from Newcastle’, which opens The Book of Newcastle, one...

Resonant Elements: Review of Edge, by Katrina Porteous

Scientists and engineers are revealing the size and complexities of our universe in new and sometimes bewildering detail. Josh Allsop considers how Katrina Porteous's third poetry collection, Edge, translates the inhuman scales of the quantum and the cosmic into language. If I asked what you associate with Saturn’s largest moon, would you respond with the...

Climate Crisis in Dystopian Durham: Review of O Man of Clay, by Eliza Mood

Set partly in a future Hartlepool, Eliza Mood’s novel O Man of Clay brings the realities of a global climate crisis back to the North East, a historical centre of the industrial revolution. Paul Cockburn reviews an inventive and well-constructed account of a multifaceted issue. This review was first published on Paul Cockburn's own blog....

Remembering Ourselves: Review of The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché

As Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us is reissued by Bloodaxe Books, Soumyaroop Majumdar discovers that there is not much separating ourselves in 2019 from the poet who witnessed the violent history of El Salvador four decades ago. Carolyn Forché’s 1981 collection The Country Between Us, containing accounts of her time in El Salvador in...

A Puck of Poetry: Review of Mischief, by Peter Bennet

Peter Bennet’s latest collection, Mischief, takes readers from rural Northumberland to the aisles of Tesco, blending classical references with contemporary wit along the way. Soumyaroop Majumdar reviews. There is a lot to be said about the ordering of a collection, and with the very first poem, ‘The Place I am’, Peter Bennet pitches into the...