Category: Review (Page 50 of 132)

4 out of 5 stars

Living between two cultures is not always easy, but it is something that British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus has had to live with, but it is not the only divide he has to manage, he is also deaf so he has to live in his quiet world and interact with the loud world. He has expressed these multifaceted identities in the poems in the book.

There are poems about his father, memories from his childhood and his later dementia. The collection is named after the pub that he sat outside while his father was inside drinking. Some of the poems show just how furious he can be, there is a furious rebuttal of Ted Hughes poems, Deaf School, with the original prose redacted and his response, After Reading ‘Deaf School’ by the Mississippi River and the poem that is a tribute to three women murdered in Haiti, For Jesula Gelin, Vanessa Previl and Monique Vincent.

What language
Would we speak
Without ears?

Nowadays, instead of violence,
I write until everything goes
quiet

This is quite a powerful collection, he is justifiable angry, but does not let it become a whinge, rather his energy is directed to raising awareness and making things equal. I liked the addition of sign language amongst the poems too. There are many ways of communicating what we want to say and this collection is another way of doing just that.

Three Favourite Poems
Jamaican British
My Mother Remembers
Happy Birthday Moon

5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Up until I picked this book up I had never heard of Bruce Wannell. He was a great traveller but has written no travel books. His knowledge of Indo-Persian and Islamic civilization was encyclopaedic and he left no written works on that either. He was an excellent musician and linguist too, he could speak fluently in French, Italian, English or German as well as conversing in Turkish and Greek. His first love though was the cultures of the middle east, speaking Iranian and Afghan Persian so he could absorb as much of their cultures as possible. He could also talk in Arabic, Pushtu, Urdu, Swahili. No wonder he was described as the greatest Orientalist of his generation.

He seems to know everyone too; he would arrive in London to visit friends and within the hour, Afghan musicians would be arriving at their door to play music for the household. Almost everywhere he went he seemed to know someone. His home in the UK was a tiny attic room in York, filled with books and the things that he treasured, but he was most at home in the mountains of Afghanistan and Iran. He had a deep understanding of their culture and he was not among them to prove a point, just to share their way of life. He could mix with the lowliest villager and the most powerful sheikhs and they all respected him

Everyone knew Bruce Wannell, but at the same time I feel as though none of us knew him at all

This book is a series of wonderful and generous tributes from his friends and people that came to know him over his life. It seems that he had the time and kind words for everyone that he met. He would occasionally get himself in trouble, every now and again he could ruffle feathers, but he was a charming man who could almost talk his way out of any situation. He had almost no money and yet still managed to eat and travel. He had an eye for things that gave him pleasure, whether they were ceramics, fine Persian clothes or the tastiest food, he always somehow acquired them. Music was something that gave him enormous pleasure, he would find a home with a piano and persuade the owner to let him play it and then invite people to come and listen. At the various concerts that he arranged there would be anonymous men from the civil service in their suits, William Dalrymple would take one look at them and could tell they were spooks. Was he a spy? Dalrymple implies that he was as he never really got to the bottom of what Wannell was doing in Peshawar or why he had to leave their in a hurry.

Reading this, I now feel that I know him so much better, but this is just the briefest of introductions. There are not many of his type left in the world now and his absence has left a huge gap in the lives of those that could call him their friend. 

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The term rewilding has become the latest buzz word in conservation and environmental circles. But what does it actually mean? And does it actually work in practice? In essence, it means taking large steps back in the way we treat landscapes and the animals that inhabit them, reintroducing the apex predators and large herbivores and letting the highly interdependent ecosystems readjust accordingly. The answer to the second question is yes it does.

It is still a controversial subject though, and there is resistance to actioning these sorts of changes to the landscape from both landowners and environmentalists. The return of wolves to the highlands of Scotland would be fantastic, but for some people, this is a step too far. In this book, practising ecologists Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe explain the science behind rewilding and go into some detail on schemes that have worked around the world.

Rewilding is not about turning the clock back and restoring damaged ecosystems to an arbitrary past baseline. Rather, it is about restoring networks of interactions between communities of organisms and their physical environment, along with the ecological process that emerge from these interactions.

They go into so detail about the sorts of animals that are needed to bring about lasting and significant change to the ecosystems. It turns out that as good as apex predators are altering the dynamic, the best animals for changing ecosystems are large herbivores. In Europe we used to have large cattle breed called aurochs, these are now extinct but there is a scheme to selectively breeding older species of cattle to recreate this ancient species. The result of this is the Taurus, these have been bred with large horns, small udders and longer legs. It is intended that these will become the wild bovine to populate the rewilded areas in years to come.

One of the countries that have had a lot of success with their scheme in the Netherlands. They have decided to take an offensive approach to rewilding, they acquired large herbivores including the Konik ponies and Heck cattle and let them loose on the new nature reserve in Oostvaardersplassen. Slowly they transformed the landscape and it became more like the New Forest, a mix of open ground and trees. Another case study is on reintroducing large tortoises onto the islands of Mauritius and how they replace the damaging non-native rabbits and goats that were there. Species that were endangered have bounced back.

I think that the message this book sends is really good, the authors have selected solid case studies demonstrating that the science behind rewilding is strong. Mostly the prose is ok to read, but occasionally it read like a paper in a journal, but thankfully not too often. Worth reading if you are interested in the subject.

4 out of 5 stars

People have reconnected to the natural world during lockdown in many ways, some are there for the fresh air and to get out away from the limits of our walls, others are there to walk the dog and some have found what has been missing from our lives of screens and 24-hour notifications.

This first collection from Seán Hewitt views all of life’s ups and downs through the physical elements of nature. But in these poems, he goes far deeper into our psyche and our intangible response to the things that we see around us. There are poems on birds, trees and dryads, ethereal beings that are said to come from oak.

There is more to this that just poems about the natural world, they touch on the sacred and the profane, the pure time and those stolen moments among lovers. His words add an important spiritual dimension, linking himself to the natural world.

this tree seems suddenly like a stillness
a circle of quiet air, a place to stand

now that I have had to leave
and cannot think where I might go next

I really liked this and I can’t exactly say why that is. Not for any specific reason, it is just a collection that is immersive and gets under your skin in all sorts of ways. The centre part is taken from the Irish tale, Buile Suibhn which I liked, but not as much as the rest of the book. His language is simple and charged with power and draws deep from the natural world. Stunning cover too.

Three Favourite Poems
Barn Owls in Suffolk
Dormancy
Wild Garlic

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

In November 1925, David and Frieda Lawrence arrived on the Italian Rivera. They had escaped the cold and drab English winter and were hoping for the sun. They had arrived by train in the town of Spotorno. He was leaning out the window of the carriage taking in the sight of the sparkling sea when he saw Rina Secker on the platform. She was the wife of his publisher, Martin and she was taking them to Villa Bernarda. It was located just under the castle and had views of the Mediterranean its own vines which provided red and white wine for them. It was the beginning of his love affair with the country.

Over the next six months though everything would change for them both. Lawrence was not particularly healthy and living here was to offer his some respite from the industrial place that England had become. It would also be a place where he would become fiercely productive and as Frieda put it ‘a writing machine’ . He grew to love and loathe Italy in equal measure though but liked the way that the people did things by feel and not by some mechanical coldness as in the UK.

Frieda believed in free love and David wanted stability and family life. Frieda would become attracted to their landlord, a dashing Italian army officer from the Bersaglieri Regiment and embarked on an affair with him. She was born Emma Maria Frieda Johanna von Richthofen and was a distant relation of the Red Baron. She was pretty in her youth and had a succession of lovers. She married Ernest Weekly, a Professor at Nottingham, and had three children with him. She was to meet Lawrence after her husband invited him for lunch. Before long they were having an affair and when her husband found out, he ended the marriage and forbade access to her three children. She and David were married a little while after.

The stay in Spotorno was the first of many places that they stayed in the country. They spent a little time in Florence before heading to the town of Abruzzo high above Rome in the mountains. It wasn’t ideal so they took up Compton Mackenzie’s offer of accommodation on the island of Capri. Then he spent some time in Sicily looking at some of the Greek temples. He wasn’t that impressed with the island to begin with, but it grew on him and they decided to settle there in the town on Taormina. The villa is still there and they even named the dusty road to it, after him.

All of these details of where and when they stayed, who they mixed and the various marital problems that they had, have been teased out of the unpublished letters and diaries of Rina Secker. It makes for a fascinating series of stories and Owen shows how each of the factors that were causing friction and heartache actually helped him in his novel writing. Not being in England sharpened Lawrence’s literary sense and he became a better writer because of his distance from England as well as drawing on some of the people that he knew in Italy that became characters in his books.

Lawrence reminded me a little of writers like Patrick Leigh Fermor and Laurence Durrell, in the sense that some of their English characteristics were distilled and concentrated in the Mediterranean sun and this was very visible in their works. I have known about Lady Chatterley’s Lover for decades and it is best known for the scandal that it caused at the time, I must confess I have never read any of his novels! Though having now read this fascinating book about him, I do quite fancy reading his book Sea and Sardinia to see what he thought of that beautiful island.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The Portuguese colony of Macau was first founded in 1557 and was the first European settlement in Asia. Over the next 450 years, it developed its own distinct and unique culture. This tiny 45 square mile island is about 37 miles of Hong Kong and it is now a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.

Graeme Hall was living in Hong Kong when he first became fascinated by this little colony and visited many times. This short and perfectly formed short-story collection is a result of those hours spent there and studying the culture of Macau. There are stories about an arranged marriage, a fishing trip and a man looking for his family. My favourite story was An Apartment on Coloane, which is about an old man who has an unnerving sense of what is to come.

I have not been to Macau but I can imagine what it is like as I am fortunate to have been to Hong Kong a few times. That blend of Western and Chinese made it a special place, and I can only imagine that Macau is the same. I really liked this collection, but if there was one flaw with this book it is that there are only eight stories within. I reached the end and I wanted it to be at least three times as many stories of this fascinating place. A great little set of stories.

5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

We all have our favourite parts of this country, one of my is West Bay in Dorset, it is a beautiful place to visit on the Jurassic Coast at the end of Chesil Beach. Sitting by the sea watching the boats come in and out of the harbour is a lovely way to spend a day. But even in this beautiful spot, there are things that you probably haven’t noticed on the fringes of our society and have stories of their own to tell.

Gareth Rees has been collecting these stories for a while now and placing them on his web site, Unofficial Britain and for the first time, they have been gathered in this book. He begins with the electricity pylon, a mundane enough object that unless you look for them, they will escape your notice. Pylons were designed by the architect Sir Reginald Blomfield. He did a classical design inspired by the shape of Egyptian obelisks; they are far more ornate than they need be. Pylons divide people, a fair number consider them a blot on the landscape but there are others who see them in a very different light. These pylon poets appreciate them for what they are and their presence in the landscape. The pinnacle of this ‘Worship of the Hum’ is best expressed by the author David Southwall and his creation of Hookland, a collection of weird folklore drawn from ancient rituals.

The stone circle is a ritual space that were constructed in from the Neolithic era onwards. They still have a presence in the landscape today and many people are drawn to them. Some people see that circular features in the modern cityscape have a similar draw to those ancient ones, and Rees goes into some detail about Glasgow after seeing a map on the pillar of a flyover. It was a map of the inner ring road filled in black. Known as urban geomancy, people study maps in detail to read and interpret them, much like ley lines. Even a modern-day replica of a stone circle that he visits at the Coul Roundabout in Fife. Even though it is new, it still feels alive.

Anybody should be able to feel a connection with place, no matter where they grew up or where they live, even in the densest concrete jungles or the most monotonous suburban sprawls

If you were to imagine a haunted house, the film world has tropes that spring to mind. It would be at the bottom of a lane, the vegetation would be dark and oppressive, windows would be broken and so on. He is seeking ghosts that can be found in relatively modern homes and he heads to Grimsby to investigate the presence of a ghostly nun and other supernatural events in the town. Poverty and lack of investment have turned estates that were once full of life and people into ghost homes. We can project our fears onto any inanimate object.

Remnants of factories and industrial sites that are shadows of their former glory are other places where their presence is still felt many years after they stopped being the main employers in their towns. He talks about sirens that would sound for no apparent reason at night waking people up and old industrial sites that had sinister and secret uses, places that even now can raise hairs on the back of your neck. Edgelands have a life of their own, some of it is natural, plants that cling onto life in the most unexpected ways and some of it manmade and often slightly unnerving. Offerings that have always been left in spiritual sites can now be found in places that you wouldn’t expect like the underpasses of motorways and interchanges; he is with friends when he finds a vintage doll holding flowers. They have a raft of questions that this inert doll is never going to be able to answer for them.

We know almost nothing of ritual items left by our ancestors, so how will an archaeologist of the future interpret the things that we are leaving behind? Some features of the urban landscape have reached cult status, one of those was the Redcliffe flyover in Bristol; it has been replaced by a roundabout, but its loss was mourned by many. Near the M32 they find a shrine, though which god it is honouring is a mystery. Spaghetti Junction has 1 million vehicles pass along its twisting roads, but most are utterly unaware of the river that flows underneath it and the wildlife that it supports.

Landscapes overlay landscapes and if you know how and where to look you can see the past clearly. Rees is fascinated by the thin places of this country, places where the past and the present overlap and he see this most clearly in the industrial estates that you can find in every town and city and the desolate areas that are there if you know where to look. They walk along Bromley Hall Road, past salvage businesses and knackers yards and stop to look at the fifteenth-century hall that is remarkably still there and is the oldest brick building in London. Concrete multistorey car parks are a bit of an eyesore unless you happen to have a thing about brutalist architecture. When I drive around them, they always feel a bit too small for the cars that they are supposed to be sheltering. Rees is in Bristol to discover the stories he has heard about hauntings in a particular building.

Near where I grew up was a huge mental institution called Brookwood Hospital. Most of the residents were gone by the mid-1980s, bar a few inside a 6m high fenced-off building. Before the rest was flattened to build homes on we used to play in the partially derelict buildings on the site. I don’t remember any ghosts at the time, but it could be creepy. Rees recounts stories of those that have seen movement behind windows of hospitals in Manchester and of shrieking that disrupted filming in an establishment in Nottingham. To close he heads north on the M6, an almost ritualist journey that he remembers well from his childhood and it is fitting that he ends up in Tebay South Service station where there are standing stones that that fit in even though they shouldn’t.

Sometimes the present can haunt the living as much as the past

I thought that this was an excellent book. I like his curiosity in anything and everything that he sees, be it modern or ancient and he searches for meaning in some form in his subjects. It is a heady mix of folklore, history, landscape and cityscape writing and all built on the foundation of psychogeography. He writes well too and gets the balance just right between being fact and unease with his subject matter. If you have the slightest interest about the place that you live and want to find out what goes on in those tiny triangles of land which most people avoid, then this is a good place to start. Can also recommend these books that pick up on similar themes:

Scarp by Nick Papadimitriou

Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts

Unofficial Countryside by Richard Mabey

Strange Labyrinth by Will Ashon

4 out of 5 stars

In Water and Sky, Neil Sentance told us about some of the members of his family and the Lincolnshire landscape where they lived and how it shaped his life and theirs. In Ridge and Furrow, he is back to tell us about some more characters.

The first story is about Frank, a gentleman who had been married to Lottie and since she had passed, his life had felt empty and hollow. His memories of the time spent with her lay heavy on his mind and in time they became overwhelming. There are memories of his mother, a teenager when the big freeze hit in the sixties and a big fan of the Westerns, something she passes to Neil.

He writes about Harold who had had many different jobs; bus conductor, an ambulance driver miner, working in a forge but now is a gravedigger. Trying to chip through the frozen ground to lay the winter dead to rest is hard work. Then there is the story of Fred, a giant of a man and tough farmer with a tendency to drink hard at times and his wife Florrie who worked equally hard on their farm

These stories, essays and vignettes to members of his family are full of life’s rich memories, from the happy moments and tragedies that hit every family in each generation. I liked the way that he starts with a relatively recent history and walks us back through the time in the company of his family. He is quite some writer and if there was one flaw it is quite a short book and leaves you wanting more.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Shuttling back and forth between London and the North, never staying in one place to feel rooted. He existed without belonging anywhere and because of this felt of the periphery of places. It was those feelings that drew him to the edges of the Lake District National Park.

It was the discovery of The Lake District Boundary Walk devised by Graham K. Dugdale in 1996 buried in the Ambleside library that gave him an idea. He decided that he would follow these routes alone on these mostly forgotten parts of the park and being on the fringe took him away from all the crowds. He didn’t have the luxury of doing it all in one stage as Dugdale recommends, rather he had to do it in stages as and when he could. It would be kind of an enormous beating the bounds exercise, a modern-day pilgrimage to the real Lakes behind the tourist façade.

He begins his circular route around at the wonderfully named Plumgarths or Toadpool as it is known on the maps. It is a strange pear-shaped roundabout that you will only realise if you have to do a U-turn. Exploring the verge on foot, he is shouted at by some bloke in a white van, by the time he has got back to his car he is soaked and watches two ambulances and three police cars go past. He soon finds out what they are there for when he was asked to run around because of an accident. It was an inauspicious start to his journey; a week later he was back.

His first walk takes him past the Helsfell Wolf, a skeleton that was found among the stones and who now resides in the Kendal Museum and a haunting memory of the predators that once walked our landscapes. He soon passes the Greenside Lime Kiln, that was saved from dereliction back in 2009 and a reminder of our industrial past. This mix of wild landscape and ancient rocks alongside brightly lit industrial estates and small villages make up the majority of things that he sees on his circumnavigation of the park. He walks slowly through the Swinside Stone Circle moving from stone to stone, trying to imagine what is was like in the Neolithic age when it was built. It was thought to be a place where a sleepwalker entered the human world at night.

On his walk from Newbiggin to Gosforth, there is a misty gloom as he passes a 9th Century Anglo-Saxon Cross place to mark the point where four ancient trackways met. Near here is one of Britain’s most haunted castles and it is a place where human has tried to fight back against the sea, not always with total success. Windscale as it was originally called is a political folly on a monumental scale. Politician rushed the construction so they could have a seat on the global pollical table, but it was known to regularly emit vast quantities of radioactive contamination, and that was before the accident. It was renamed Sellafield in 1981 in the hope that people would forget the past. It is still a glowing hot potato… The armed guards outside the Sellafield power station had a dim view of him taking photographs of the site; it was amicably resolved though.

His final route takes him from Shap back to Plumgarths. It feels like the arse end of nowhere, but there are still hints of the modern world around as he locks his bike up opposite a quarry. It was in this are that Andy Goldsworthy built and moved his arch from town centres to laybys and before it ended up at Shap Beck Quarry.

I have been to the Lakes a few times and always thought that they were a beautiful part of our country. The thought of actually wanting to walk all around the edges would have never occurred to me, but defining the limits of something is what I like to do. Banning’s book is full of the mundane, littered grass verges, abandoned cars, telegraph pole and pylons and the occasional herd of cows. But in amongst the detritus of modern life is a glimpse of the ancient and the eerie that can still be found if you know where and how to look at the landscape. I really liked this book, the drawings by Iain Sharpe and the photos enhance the hallucinatory feel to the journey. Highly recommended.

4 out of 5 stars

Most 23-year-olds these days have just emerged from university with a mountain of debt and not much in the way of prospects. Way back in 1982 when Elspeth Beard was 23, she was halfway through her architecture degree and feeling miserable after a relationship had failed. She needed something to distract her so decided to embark on an around the world trip on her trusty 1974 BMW R60/6. She approached various bike manufacturers and press for support and possible sponsorship, but no one was interested, in fact, they were quite scathing of her attempt. This made her even more determined to do it.

She serviced her bike and packed it up in a crate and sent it on it’s way to New York. She would be following by jet and a month later in October to begin her first leg across America. Riding out of New York was quite special, but she realised that she may have an issue being on a bike when she stopped for fuel and the attendants ignored her. It was only by taking her helmet off that they saw she wasn’t a troublesome biker and would serve her. Her route took her to Detroit and then south to New Orleans before heading west to Los Angeles. There were a few heart-stopping moments one in particular when four Hells Angels pull up alongside her, pure speed and excellent cornering ability of her bike meant she could get away.

Trying to get a visa into Australia was proving problematic, they wouldn’t let her have a working visa nor a tourist visa. Even flying to Hawaii to see if she could get a visa from there was to prove fruitless. Her bike went there and she ended up in New Zealand for a brief break and to meet up with a boyfriend from London called, Mark. A sympathetic official, who was a biker too, finally gave her the visa she wanted. Australia beckoned.

Please to be reunited with her bike, she needed to earn some money to fund the next stage of her trip. She had a contact with an architectural practise from London, so went to see them and they gave her a job; sadly they were much less bothered about paying her, so she ended up working in a bar in the evenings. She left the first place and they didn’t even notice, the second practice was much better and it gave her lots of experience and she saw some of her plans turn into real buildings. Six months had passed, she had built a custom set of aluminium panniers and it was time to hit the road again.

Her route around Australia would take her north to Townsville, before turning west and then south to pass Alice Springs and Ayres Rock and then west again to Perth. She was expecting to ride along dusty roads in the outback, but the time she was travelling through they had had tremendous storms and the road was flooded. She cadges a lift with a road train driver at one point as her bike can’t cope with the weather.

South-East Asia was next, her bike was shipped to Bali and she got on a plane to Singapore and this time was actually looking forward to seeing Mark. As much as she loved the place, this was the start of a small run of bad luck that caused little setbacks and delays, but she did make it to Bangkok safely. India beckoned.

As Madras emerged through the mist, it was exactly as she anticipated it would be, crumbling, chaotic, colourful and yet charming. Riding in this country would be a challenge and she had to reach Nepal so she could meet up with her parents for the first time in a long time, so had made the decision to take the train from Madras to Calcutta. It was a wise decision as it saved her at least two days travelling. Heading north from Calcutta, she realised how challenging it would be on the roads just to stay alive. Every time she stopped, especially in what seemed to be an empty part of the country, she was immediately surrounded by Indian men wanting to touch the bike. It was hard going, but she made it into Nepal. Mark arrived and they decided to take one of the organised treks up into the mountains.

Beard had now reached the final leg of her mammoth 35,000-mile journey, riding from Kathmandu all the way back to the UK. She was reluctant to head back to India but knew it had to be done, but before that, she had to carry out some urgent and necessary repairs on her bike. It was while doing this that she met another rider on a BMW. His name was Robert and he was Dutch. He had also been in Australia and was riding back home. Everywhere he went in Australia, he had heard about this lady riding a BMW around the world and had always hoped to meet her. They helped each other repair their bike and agreed to meet up in two weeks time at Agra.

Travelling through India was the toughest part of the trip, but having some company made things a little bit easier. There were a few delays in getting through the Punjab and into Pakistan, but they managed it in the end, but she was dreading crossing into Iran as she hadn’t ever got the correct paperwork because of the cost; she would have to try and blag her way in somehow. They made it, but she was wary of travelling through a country that had just had an Islamic Revolution and was at war with its neighbour. Before long they were in Turkey.

It was here that they suffered their first police hassle. They suspected them of carrying drugs, but a full search revealed nothing. This part of the trip felt like a small holiday, especially along the coast, where they spent time eating and swimming. They survived the road of death between Zagreb and Belgrade and they were finally into mainland Europe and then onto the terrifying system that is the German Autobahns. There was a brief detour to the Netherlands to meet Robert’s mother and then for the first time in 799 days, she was home.

For anyone to undertake a journey of this magnitude takes some doing, but to do it mostly alone in the age before modern and instant communication seems unreal now. Beard had to put up with hassle from men in most places she visited, but she was determined that this sort of behaviour would not be tolerated. Her tenacity meant that she kept going in what occasionally seemed to be overwhelming odds. She is one brave lady and this is a book that is well worth reading.