Category: Book reviews
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The Several reasons why Finbar’s Father is unique
There’s a story here I read about once a year. It’s unique, and it transports me every time. This book is The Several Deaths of Finbar’s Father & other stories, published in 2014. It’s the anthology of the very best works that came to us through our international competitions the year before. A moment contains…
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Left Books Forward
Heads up – this looks like a political post, and it is – but mainly, it’s one of my ‘Books for Christmas’ soapbox posts… We in Hastings were quite surprised when we heard that Momentum was an organisation for wild young Trots. We in Momentum Hastings thought we were a group of all sorts of…
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Cover Stories
One of the things I loved about working on our short story and poetry anthologies was figuring out how to put the covers together. The contents would be of excellent quality – we published the very best from the shortlists of our annual, international short story competitions, so the quality was guaranteed – but their…
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The Astonishing Worlds of Mandy Pannett
How many years ago did I jump on a train to Arundel to have lunch with Mandy Pannett, and talk about organising a poetry collection competition? It happened before the Corbyn movement swept me away for several years of single-minded battle; it happened before the most urgent women’s campaign of my lifetime, and before COVID,…
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Can you see us under all these bushels?
I always thought it was something leafy and twiggy we were hidden under but it turns out it’s a kind of bowl. Bushels (or in some translations, ‘vessels’) “And no man, when he hath lighted a lamp, covereth it with a vessel, or putteth it under a bed; but putteth it on a stand, that…
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Women writing poetry – scary?
Ask a poet for a bit of text to for the back jacket, to encourage readers to open her book, and you get this…. Wormwood, earth and honey Selected poems by Catherine Edmunds teasel scratches, bramble catches deep inside my den of mischief mud pies splatter, cracked plates clatter if you dare to enter here…
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The kids already know about giants, unicorns, mermaids and dragons, but …
We all know some people are a whole lot more keen to tell their stories than others. All those big hairy mythical creatures – and even some watery ones – were eager to get into the pages of the story books… …but one little creature was better at listening than telling, and whilst you may…
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Give the spirit of summer – whatever the time of year!
How many years of Jack in the Green? On the back of Keith Leech’s superb and lavishly illustrated record of Hastings’ biggest annual festival, he writes “It is now 25 years since the revival of the Hastings Jack in the Green in May 1983”. My daughter was a teenager, I think, when I first took…
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The Ball of the Future
Not yet born, not yet touched by man, it glows like a mercurial object. But I want to touch it. I want to caress the curvature of its sides and delve into its golden light. I think the inside must be huge and endless, like a stream without end, like an infinite well of possibility.…
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I know the date the world will end
Every generation, someone says that – and there are other favourite dramatic ideas that come round again and again. And when they do, people rally to them so eagerly. What is belief, that it can light such fires? Some get involved because they’re just longing to believe something. Some get involved because it’s such fun…
Kay Green 