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Silver Screen Weekly - What's Coming Up At The Cinema From Friday 29th March
Our film critic and media correspondent has been looking and trawling the new releases. Here's what you can see on the big screen this week.
Books
Poem Of The Week:
Anthem
By Kirun Kapur
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
Anthem
Love begins in a country Where oranges weep sweetness And men piss in the street. Your hands are forever binding Black strands in a plait. Your mother’s Childhood friend has steeped Your skin in coconut oil, tucked Her daughter beside you – the night Is a womb, live with twins. Heat’s body presses every body.
1:00 AM 25th March 2024
Books
Poem Of The Week:
Owl
By George Macbeth (1932-1992)
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
Image by 51581 from Pixabay
Owl
Is my favourite. Who flies like a nothing through the night, who-whoing. Is a feather duster in leafy corners ring-a-rosy-ing boles of mice. Twice you hear him call. Who is he looking for? You hear him hoovering over the floor of the wood. O would you be gold rings in the driving skull if you could? Hooded and vulnerable by the winter suns owl looks.
7:36 AM 16th March 2024
Review
An Extraordinary Life:
Three Things About Elsie
By Joanna Cannon
Artis-Ann
Features Writer
But Ronnie Butler is dead! Florence Claybourne lives in an assisted-living home for the elderly and Florence, or Flo to her friends, has fallen. The hours tick by as she lies alone in her flat and thinks about events both in the distant past and the recent. Florence is ‘on probation’.
1:01 AM 16th March 2024
Books
Poem Of The Week:
An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump
By Ali Lewis
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
Is a recreation, revised again by Wright, with the lark replaced by a grey cockatiel, witnesses repainted with faces of patrons, and the philosopher borrowed from a study by Frye, so the dim observers, who weren’t there, can’t have seen it open one moonlit wing as the pressure fell as if the last thing it felt was it felt like flying. Ali Lew…
1:00 AM 11th March 2024
Books
Defying Gravity:
Variety Turns
By Christopher Arksey
The title of Christopher Arksey’s new pamphlet for Broken Sleep Books gently ironises the elegiac nature of his poems. A backward glance to a life well-lived,
Variety Turns
extrapolates alternative meanings from the suggestion of a theatrical playbill to describe, instead, the many faces of his subject, his mother, who died in 2016.
1:00 AM 9th March 2024
Books
What A Tangled Web:
Wartime For The Chocolate Girls
By Annie Murray
I am a self-professed chocolate and cream queen. Chocolate in all its forms never disappoints but for me, king of the crop has always been Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, with Fruit and Nut as its Consort. That Edward Cadbury’s aim, as articulated in 1953, was to make the Cadbury village of Bourneville ‘a happy place’, comes as no surprise.
1:00 AM 5th March 2024
Books
Poems And Pressed Flowers:
The Botanist
By M. W. Craven
I know my faults. I can be greedy. I would rather have no chocolate at all than limit myself to just one square from the bar; give me a good book and I like nothing better than to read at every possible moment, getting acquainted with the characters and immersing myself in the action.
1:02 AM 2nd March 2024
Books
Poem Of The Week:
Rolling News Blues
By John Cooper Clarke
Rolling News Blues
BBC – the daily
Guardian
- you choose This misery soup is on a loop Rolling news blues There’s nice people doing nice things Most of the time I can’t prove it but you gotta believe me You wouldn’t hear it on the public dime BBC – the daily
Guardian
- you choose Deep concern could only earn you the Rolling news blues There’s never been a better time to be…
1:00 AM 2nd March 2024
Books
The Aestheticised Obscene:
Dirty Books
By Barry Reay & Nina Attwood
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
Barry Reay and Nina Attwood’s compelling enquiry into the murky publishing world of the early to mid-twentieth century uncovers several complex truths regarding motive and reward.
1:01 AM 29th February 2024
Books
Leeds Lit Fest 2024: 15th – 23rd June
Leeds Lit Fest 2023 Photo: Michael Godsall
Leeds Lit Fest is back for its 6th year! Festival organisers are delighted by the city’s support they have received over the last 5 years and aim to make this an engaging and inspirational festival filled with all things literary and a whole lot more!
1:00 AM 27th February 2024
Books
Poem Of The Week:
Prayer
By George Herbert (1593-1633)
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash
Prayer
Prayer, the church's banquet, Angel's age, God's breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth; Engine against the Almighty, sinner's tower, Reversèd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days world’ transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace…
1:00 AM 24th February 2024
Books
Global Bestsellers And Fan Favourites Celebrated - Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival Reveals Special Guest Authors For 2024
Top Row (L-R)Chris Carter Photo: Neil Spence; Jane Casey; Elly Griffiths Photo: Sara Reeve; Erin Kelly Photo: John Godwin; Vaseem Khan. Bottom row (L-R) Dorothy Koomson Photo: Niall McDiarmid; Liz Nugent Photo: Ruth Connolly; Abir Mukherjee Photo: Nick Tucker; Shari Lapena Photo: Tristan Ostler; Richard Osman Photo: Conor O'Leary
Harrogate International Festivals has announced the Special Guests for the 2024 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, the largest and most prestigious celebration of crime fiction".
1:01 AM 23rd February 2024
Books
Backstage Pass – Harvey Lee
Harvey Lee left school in Manchester armed with a poor school report and few qualifications, with a bleak future and little else but a passion for music. His new book
Backstage Pass
tells the story of his time in the music industry, before he later became a business leader for such illustrious companies as Virgin and Microsoft.
1:00 AM 19th February 2024
Books
Apathy Is The Easy Choice:
The Seven Skins Of Esther Wilding
By Holly Ringland
A black swan falls out of the sky causing Esther Wilding to pull over, as her windscreen shatters. Having witnessed the incident, Tina Turner approaches and wants to help. Confused by this bizarre opening to a novel? I’m not surprised, but things, especially Tina Turner, are not always as they seem. Esther is on her way to her sister’s memorial. Aura walked into the sea a year ago.
7:36 AM 17th February 2024
Books
Poem Of The Week:
Chaudhri Sher Mobarik looks at the loch
By Imtiaz Dharker
Chaudhri Sher Mobarik looks at the loch
Light shakes out the dishrag sky and scatters the water with sequins.
Look, hen!
says my father,
Loch Lomond!
as if it were all his doing, as if he owned it, laird of Lomond, laird of the language.
7:35 AM 17th February 2024
Books
Two Left Feet:
Vicky’s Ditties
By Victoria J. Parsons
It is a tribute to Bradford-born author, Vicky Parsons’, tenacity and skill that she should succeed in bringing her story, or more properly the story of her life, into the public gaze.
1:05 AM 12th February 2024
Books
Poem Of The Week:
Sniper
By Jon Miller
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
Sniper
In the street, tanks, rubble. Soldiers wear patterns of sand. The village a jigsaw of dust. Children in doorways hold the hands of ghosts. I sight along the muzzle buried in a hole in the air. You are small, distant. The size of a sparrow. Smaller. You have no family. Were never born. You are just a single dot of God. I crouch behind chimneys. Aerials. Satellite dishes.
10:55 AM 11th February 2024
Books
Longborough Festival Opera The First 30 Years
Andrew Palmer
Group Editor
Richard Bratby has had a busy time. Having chronicled the 50th anniversary of the Academy of Ancient Music, he has turned the first 30 years of the Longborough Festival Opera into a book. It is a beautifully presented volume, as befits this annual summer opera fest.
1:01 AM 10th February 2024
Books
Review: Dean Rhetoric’s
Foundry Songs
James Goodall
Features Writer
Dean Rhetoric’s
Foundry Songs
is my first foray into dystopian poetry, and this anthology certainly features all the hallmarks of the genre. The poems open inauspiciously, never on a bright spring day with crocuses sprouting. ‘Psalm of Bandages III’ begins: ‘It’s October and the trees are cancerous’, which is about as apocalyptic as it can get.
1:00 AM 8th February 2024
Books
Blow, Winds, And Crack Your Cheeks: Daniel J. Mooney’s
the 14th Storm
James Goodall
Features Writer
The 14th Storm
(2023) by Limerick-born author Daniel J. Mooney is an Irish eco dystopia – the first I’ve had the pleasure of reading, though I doubt there are many contenders for the title! It is 2043, and climate change has taken a turn for the worse. Violent storms are a regular feature of life, rendering much of the planet uninhabitable.
1:00 AM 7th February 2024
Books
Review:
Before We Go Any Further
By Tristram Fane Saunders
Like a man drifting in and out consciousness, Tristram Fane Saunders’ grip on poetic theme and direction is fevered, mediated by his own susceptibility to the surreal, or to alternative landscapes that shape what he sees. More intriguing still that he should prosecute his aim in a range of bravura formal approaches whose framework can never contain the arbitrary image-making of his thinking.
1:10 AM 6th February 2024
Books
Poem Of The Week:
33.
By Kim Moore
33.
I knew him when the summer was heavy with bees and all the flying things were thrumming in the heat. I walked with him once through How Tun woods to find the path the foxes take, and yes I saw the marks upon his arms, though I never heard him speak of pain.
1:05 AM 3rd February 2024
Review
Books: Refiner's Fire Richard Bratby
The Academy of Ancient Music is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, the orchestra commissioned Richard Bratby to write its history. AAM, as it is affectionately known, was the first orchestra to be set up in the UK using period instruments, and Bratby uses first-hand testimony from artists, critics, collaborators, and supporters to chart its development.
1:02 AM 3rd February 2024
Books
‘Remember Who You Are’:
The Look
By Lee Coates
Never mind the Kubrick Stare, one look from my dad was enough to fill me with terror. I will say now, he never once touched me, never hit me in anger, nor touched a hair on my head even though when I was a child, a smack was not generally considered misplaced.
1:01 AM 3rd February 2024
Books
First Ever Barnsley Book Festival Kicks Off Today
Barnsley Libraries first-ever Barnsley Book Festival is set to take place in various locations across the borough from 2nd February to 23rd March 2024.
1:07 AM 2nd February 2024
Books
Poem Of The Week:
The NUM
By Sarah Wimbush
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
The NUM
I am here in your breast pocket, the size of a bus pass and the Magna Carta – been sacked for been starved for. My foundations are federations, old as the moon and lassoed to oceans.
10:56 AM 28th January 2024
Books
CWA Announce Double Diamond Dagger Winners
For the first time in its 70-year history, the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) is awarding two authors its annual Diamond Dagger. Lynda La Plante and James Lee Burke are 2024’s recipients of the Diamond Dagger- the highest accolade in the genre.
8:04 AM 23rd January 2024
Books
Poem Of The Week:
She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep
By Robert Graves (1895-1985)
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
Image by Sunflair from Pixabay
She tells her love while half asleep
She tells her love while half asleep In the dark hours, With half-words whispered low: As earth stirs in her winter sleep And puts out grass and flowers Despite the snow, Despite the falling snow. As snowdrops and crocuses force their tentative flame through the resistless ‘green fuse’ of biological purpose, and we marvel at their indefatig…
7:58 AM 20th January 2024
Books
Negotiating Family Life:
The Choice
By Penny Hancock
Renee Gulliver is a relationships therapist but work and family can throw up very different problems and your own family relationships are often much harder to identify and negotiate than those of strangers. As they say ‘the cobbler’s children are often the worst shod’. Outwardly, the Gullivers appear to be the perfect family and to ‘have it all’.
1:03 AM 20th January 2024
Books
Poem Of The Week:
Snow
By Gillian Clarke
Snow
We're brought to our senses, awake to the black and whiteness of world. Snow's sensational. It tastes of ice and fire. Hold a handful of cold. Ball it between your palms to throw at the moon. Relish its plushy creak. Shake blossoms from chestnut and beech, gather its laundered linen in your arms. A twig of witch hazel from the ghost-garden burns like myrrh in this room. Listen!
1:00 AM 13th January 2024
Review
Between Discretion And Propriety:
Date With Evil
By Julia Chapman
It’s been a while. My tardy response to volume eight of Julia Chapman’s consistently high quality detective series, set in the thinly-disguised Dales market town of Bruncliffe, has been a long train coming. Though in the profoundest sense it makes no difference, because the continuum upon which her extended narrative is set will sustain critical hiatuses, such is the standard of her writing.
1:00 AM 10th January 2024
Books
Crimefest 2024 Highlights
The UK’s biggest crime fiction convention returns for the 16th year in 2024, with Laura Lippman and Denise Mina as its Featured Guests. CrimeFest, sponsored by Specsavers, is hosted from 9 to 12 May 2024 at the Mercure Bristol Grand Hotel. Up to 150 authors will descend on Bristol appearing in over 50 panels.
1:00 AM 9th January 2024
Books
Secrets Are Poison:
The Fortunes Of Olivia Richmond
By Louise Davidson
Artis-Ann
Features Writer
Jane Eyre
meets
Woman in Black
with a hefty dose of Mrs Danvers stirred into the mix - this is a real gothic tale of intrigue. The opening describes the death of a child, a tragedy deemed to be misadventure but with the implication that the coroner’s verdict is far from accurate. Slowly, as the pages are turned, the horrifying truth is revealed.
1:02 AM 6th January 2024
Books
Poem Of The Week:
January
By Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
January
For January I give you vests of skins, And mighty fires in hall, and torches lit; Chambers and happy beds with all things fit; Smooth silken sheets, rough furry counterpanes; And sweetmeats baked; and one that deftly spins Warm arras; and Douay cloth, and store of it; And on this merry manner still to twit The wind, when most his mastery the wind wins.
1:02 AM 6th January 2024
Books
Book Review Round-Up: 2023
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
Image by izoca from Pixabay
I’ve never been a lover of lists, though a concise condensation of the best of our review output for the year serves, if nothing else, as a useful reminder to readers of the good stuff they may have missed.
8:48 AM 30th December 2023
Books
Poem Of The Week:
Winter Solitude
By Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
Image by Fabrice Villard on Unsplash
Winter solitude
(tr. Robert Hass) Winter solitude — In a world of one colour the sound of wind. We could waste words reflecting upon a miserable, sodden season of ‘named’ storms, gusty winds and deluges. Or we could consider, instead, seventeenth century Japanese poet, Matsuo Bashō’s, exquisite Haiku of a proper winter.
1:03 AM 30th December 2023
Books
‘Tis The Season’: Artis-Ann's Book Round-Up Of 2023
Selecting my top ten of the books I’ve reviewed this year isn’t as easy as it sounds. Since I started reviewing books, for the
Yorkshire Times
, I’ve published over 140 reviews, including 39 just this year, so where to start? Chronologically, in rank order, or by category? I opted for categories. I’m not offering you a countdown on the lines of
Top of the Pops
.
1:00 AM 30th December 2023
Books
Poem Of The Week:
December 24th
By Sue Vickerman
December 24th
It is almost five. It is
Heiligabend
. The forecast shows snow cartwheeling over Saarland. The sun goes down on your cul-de-sac, on your parents’ small, well-tended garden. Your yard is swept. Your steps are gritted. Your mother’s broom rests in an apple tree’s elbow. She hurries outdoors at the very last minute to dead-head a rose.
12:02 AM 24th December 2023
Review
Chemistry Is Change:
Lessons In Chemistry
By Bonnie Garmus
Oh wow! From page one, the main character, Elizabeth Zott, had me hooked, a protagonist of singular charm. I am no scientist, erring as I did at school, on the side of the Arts - English especially, and Languages, so the book’s title might have deterred me a little (sorry Mr Lowson, I know you tried!).
1:01 AM 23rd December 2023
Books
Opera For All: The Biography Of Sir Peter Jonas
If ever there was a biography that was a touchstone for what is happening in 2023 in the UK arts scene and specifically opera, then Julia Glesner’s informative and enlightening life of Sir Peter Jonas is it. Edward Maltby’s translation from German to English is to be welcomed as it enables us to explore the fascinating life of an impresario who dominated the opera world.
12:00 AM 20th December 2023
Books
Poem Of the Week:
Wind
By Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
Wind
This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
7:29 AM 18th December 2023
Books
Children's Author Holds Special Book Reading at Sherburn
Amanda Peace
A teaching assistant turned author from Kirk Fenton CE Primary School hosted a special reading of her new book,
Bob, The Tiny Dinosaur
, at an event held at Sherburn & Villages Community Library last Saturday.
1:00 AM 18th December 2023
Books
The Three-Legged Stool:
More Confessions Of A Forty-Something F**k Up
By Alexandra Potter
Artis-Ann
Features Writer
Have you noticed what a perfect world we live in? Well, according to social media at least, where everyone seems to enjoy the ideal existence.
1:03 AM 9th December 2023
Books
Poem Of the Week:
Union Jack
By Khadijah Ibrahiim
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
Union Jack
Mum always said she should have gone back home when
Rivers of Blood
ran deep in the current of Enoch Powell’s hate …
the River Tiber foaming with much blood… an urgent encouragement of re-emigration…
Send them back: load the ship with chocolate smiles, send them back
before the blacks take the whip hand… No blacks, no dogs, no Irish! One down a million to go!
1:00 AM 9th December 2023
Books
Children's Poem Of The Week:
Suitcase Poem
By Michael Rosen
Suitcase Poem
I’m a suitcase in the attic all year I’m a suitcase stuffed full of gear I’m a suitcase crammed in a hold I’m a suitcase freezing cold. Well yes … I may be a suitcase but I want to be free I want to go to the beach and swim in the sea I want to go to the mountains and learn how to ski I want to hear music dance and shout You leave me in the room when you go out.
1:01 AM 2nd December 2023
Books
Driftwood: Maureen Fry And the Angel Of The North By Rachel Joyce
Harold Fry lived in our office at school for a while and introduced himself to all of us in turn as his book was passed from eager hand to eager hand. Queenie quickly followed.
1:00 AM 2nd December 2023
Books
Yorkshire Writers Retreat To Host Quadruple Children’s Book Launch
Family-run creative hub and events venue Writers Retreat is launching four children’s books on Sunday 10 December in Beal, North Yorkshire.
9:00 AM 28th November 2023
Books
Poem Of The Week:
Hostess Trolley
By Keith Hutson
I make no apology for including an old favourite as this week’s Poem of the Week. Keith Hutson’s poetry is an extension of the life he once lived. As an experienced comedy writer and old hand in the theatre industry, he has a natural sympathy with comics and entertainers of a certain historical vintage, their predecessors in Music Hall and on the early twentieth century stage.
7:36 AM 26th November 2023
Books
Review:
The Woman In Me
- Britney Spears
Graham Clark
Music Features Writer
When Britney Spears appeared at the Open-Air Theatre in Scarborough in 2018 the experience was rather like watching a clockwork doll that had been wound up and sprung into action; the performance was almost robotic with little emotion and hardly any communication with her audience.
12:59 AM 25th November 2023
Books
Poem Of The Week:
The Starfish
By Isabel Galleymore
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
The Starfish
creeps like expired meat – fizzy-skinned, pentamerously-legged, her underfur of sucking feet shivers upon an immobile mussel whose navy mackintosh is zipped against the anchor of this fat paw, this seemingly soft nutcracker who exerts such pressure until the mussel’s jaw drops a single millimeter.
1:03 AM 18th November 2023
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