poetry
Tom Birchenough
Films in which poetry is almost a character can often become bombastic, but there’s no danger of that in Bruno Barreto’s Reaching for the Moon, whose heroine is the repressed, rather quiet American poet Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto): speaking loudly, we feel, was little in her character, even when she was in her cups (which she quite often is in this deluxe Brazilian English-language biopic).Barreto’s film is about Bishop’s complicated 15-year relationship with the affluent Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares (Glória Pires), who is the exact opposite of her partner – she’s forthright Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Mighty oaks from little acorns grow – meet Allen Ginsberg, before the beard. Daniel Radcliffe plays an 18-year-old version of the infamous beat poet in the defining moments of the artist as a young man, and the true-life episode that created the genre.A bespectacled, sheltered, bookish Jew, Ginsberg frees himself from the shackles of a mentally ill mother and dodges the shadow of a middle-class education provided for by his bourgeoisie poet father Louis Ginsberg, by heading off to Columbia University. There, he is intoxicated by the kicks of jazz, a plethora of drugs and the heady thrill of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It won’t have escaped the attention of anyone with an ear for poetry that Dylan Thomas turns 100 this year. He was born in a suburban house on a hill overlooking Swansea Bay a few months after the outbreak of war, and by his early 20s had been hailed a significant poetic voice by TS Eliot. By 39 he was dead, hastened to his grave by a lethal combination of alcohol, pneumonia and New York doctors.The roaring boy who lived hard and died young has been iconised on the cover of Sgt Pepper, and gave his name to a scrawny-voiced crooner from Minnesota (although this is sometimes disputed by Read more ...
Tim Cumming
When it comes to a blank page, artists and poets lead different kinds of lives and leave different kinds of marks. One for the eye, one for the ear, but both dependant on the thrill of recognition. The word, like paint, can be worked and reworked until the delight of a new image, a fresh metaphor in its right setting rings from the twisted garbage of lines in a notebook.Back in the days of Surrealism, Revardy and Breton delighted in new images cast from the most disparate material. I understand that thrill. It’s what makes poetry worth reading. Art and poetry are concentrated mediums. Their Read more ...
fisun.guner
Poetry has always inspired artists. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy are two of the most enduring. And according to Art Everywhere, of which I will say little here but have written about elsewhere (see sidebar), the nation’s favourite painting is inspired by a more recent poem: JW Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott shows the ill-fated heroine of Tennyson’s famous verse moving inexorably towards her watery death “like some bold seer in a trance”. The second favourite is, incidentally, another narrative illustration of an ill-fated heroine on the point of meeting her watery fate – Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is not an easy record to get a handle on. When I first got it, I bounced through a couple of tracks idly, and it felt like it was coming from the messy genre fusions of the mid-90s – somewhere between trip-hop, indie-dance, rap-rock and mildly crusty festival-dub. There are growling guitars, indie-rock basslines, anthemic reggae horns, and frontman Joshua Idehen's voice, which lies somewhere between rapper, poet, singer and orator, all making it sound like a livelier take on Tricky, or maybe Roots Manuva fronting a rock band.But idle listening is not enough for this record. For one thing Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Italian documentarist Andrea Sigre’s first feature captures with great tenderness the delicate balance of friendship that grows up between two characters who live as relative outsiders in their community. From its Italian title Io sono Li (I Am Li), we might have expected a subject based on more documentary strands involving the life of the film's eponymous Chinese immigrant heroine, who’s paying off an unquantified debt to those who arranged her journey to Italy by working in any job she's assigned, but Sigre’s film develops far beyond that towards human drama of the subtlest kind.Li mostly Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The show which Ute Lemper brought to the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the London Literature Festival - “Pablo Neruda: A Song Cycle of Love Poems” - is brand-new; the six-piece band (with which she has just recorded it, and which will be touring it) was performing it live for the first time. This Neruda project, a series of 12 love poems, is different from Lemper's most recent Charles Bukowski venture, which she succinctly described to Samira Ahmed this week on Women's Hour as "very garage, jazz-influenced, open, theatrical and dirty". As a continuous piece, the Neruda is also a departure Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When Sadler's Wells 10th Flamenco Festival opens tomorrow night with thudding heels, swirling skirts and wailing voices, some will sit there begging to know what the wailing is about. Dancers like Eva Yerbabuena and Israel Galván, singers like Estrella Morente, reach us deep in some inexpressible place with their performance, but their passion is driven by the evocative poetry of a powerful oral tradition going back some three centuries.Concise, marvellously economical in rhythm and rhyme, flamenco lyrics are usually as intense as they sound, odes to sexual passion, death and a life on the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Here’s an elegant thing to do before eight o'clock dinner - stroll out for an hour’s recital of a rollicking story-poem done by a leading actress in a hip underground venue with judiciously hip application of modern dance, then go off and diss it over your sushi. Very London life.And if the pleasure potential offered by Fiona Shaw and Phyllida Lloyd in recounting Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s splendid 1798 horror yarn The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is any yardstick, there ought to be a future for a periodic series restoring dramatic poetry to the public at the cocktail hour.Shaw herself ushers Read more ...
peter.quinn
On Sailing to Byzantium Christine Tobin's utterly singular music fuses with the amaranthine force of WB Yeats's poetry to create one of the most transporting jazz releases in aeons. From the iridescent colours of “The Wild Swans at Coole” and the statuesque tranquility of the title track, to the subtly ornamented melodic line of “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and the deeply poignant “Long-legged Fly”, the album's unique sound-world and intense depth of feeling completely seduce the senses.Tobin's incredibly empathetic band features Liam Noble (piano), Phil Robson (guitar), Gareth Lockrane ( Read more ...
peter.quinn
For the way it combined mercurial, on-the-fly interplay, seismic textural shifts and listening of the highest order, this gig was remarkable. In the space of two continuous sets there wasn't a longueur to be found, such was the incredible union of Black Top #5's boundary-pushing improv and fine-tuned musicianship.Saxophonist Steve Williamson, trumpeter Byron Wallen and vocalist Cleveland Watkiss joined Black Top founders, pianist Pat Thomas and vibist/sampler Orphy Robinson, to explore the intersection of live instruments and the technology of dub, reggae and dance floor.You would search in Read more ...