Category: Arts
-
Stories of Glasgow, warmly embraced by the Wall of Death
What are the missing stories of Glasgow? We met in The Revelator to find out.
-
Gathering seeds of hope – on a train trip from Scotland to France
The ugly dark hulk has a daunting bulk. A grim legacy of the Nazi occupation. The old submarine base still occupies the Bacalan district of Bordeaux. So many tons of concrete – 600,000 cubic metres of them – would be difficult to remove. But walk round it and there’s a surprising softening in an imaginative…
-
Everybody loves the sunshine…with a little cooling breeze
“Just bees, and things and flowers” Like a lot of formerly news-hungry journalists these days I can hardly bear to open the many journals I subscribe to. But earlier this year I read the FT’s Life of a Song. And Roy Ayers Sunshine blew Trump thunderstorms away.
-
Four poems for a budget of winners and losers – what hope?
Who and where are life’s winners and losers? North, South, East, West, there’s precious little poetry in the words and numbers of budgets, but pausing for breath on edge of Winter Solstice darkness, here’s a selection of poems drawing on a wealth of experience, the kind of human insight that could enhance political debate – and…
-
Mother Country, get it right: Benjamin Zephaniah
It’s very touching to see so many new views of this old post. It’s a tribute to the great humanity of Benjamin Zephaniah who died on Thursday 7 December 2023. His loss is mourned but his poetry lives on. As first published on Sceptical Scot in 2016. [In 2016, on 50th anniversary of Race Relations…
-
Sunset song for the winter solstice
The winter sun just hangs over the ridge of the Coolags. Its setting will seal the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. At this season the sun is a pale wick between two gulfs of darkness. So wrote George Mackay Brown, the observant eye of the great Orkney poet seeking out the touch…
-
For future generations: buried poetry
How will we remember this time? How will future generations see us? Will we survive the triple onslaught of pandemic, war and climate change?
-
The sound of loosening ice
“I’ll be mighty pissed off if I die in my last year at work,” he texted last March as Covid put paid to his plans for earlyish retirement. Perhaps my GP brother’s hands-on approach to work influenced my personal response to Gael Turnbull’s poetry.
-
Don’t let big tech Captain Hook grab lockdown loot
In our new Neverland big tech Captain Hook grows ever richer while lost boys and girls of performing arts struggle to survive.
-
We’re all islanders in a pandemic
In retrospect it all seems eerily prophetic. Those faces framed in small screens, their distant voices interconnecting in the ether. Yet for Giles Perring it’s something much simpler and more profound than Zoom
-
-
Poetry and song for a pandemic
Look up. Only look up. The night sky framed in my window is an escape from lockdown. Into darkness or light?