Curious about "The Old Curiosity Shop"?

Tackling the famed thirty-seven chapters of Charles Dickens’s ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ was never going to be an easy feat but Theatre Alibi certainly provide an impressive interpretation. With regards to modern adaptations, I confess I usually adopt an ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it attitude’ and as the play began I could hear the numerous voices of devout Dickens diehards crying ‘Why change it?’

Theatre Alibi Promotional Image

However, I was soon served one whopping slice of humble pie as Theatre Alibi proved me wrong. The writer, Daniel Jamieson, really plays with the theme of curiosity. His aim to ‘look at contemporary Britain with something of a Dickens’ eye’ is realised in his witty translation of Nineteenth Century London into the current economic climate. Jamieson succeeds in opening the audience’s ‘eyes afresh’ to the ‘curious country’ we still live in. The correlations between a novel written a hundred and seventy years ago and the world we live in today appear to be many.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this dark tale could only leave you reaching out for the tissues, Theatre Alibi weaves this tale of woe with ‘laugh out loud’ comedy.  The play captures the perfect balance of laughter and despair, revealing Dickens’s dark humour. Dick.E. Swiveller played by Malcolm Hamilton provides the perfect comic interlude for any unwanted tension. Hamilton’s characterisation is uncontrollably funny and well worth a trip to see!

For all you arty students, interested in music, setting, film and photography, Theatre Alibi certainly has something to offer. Their famed reputation as contemporary storytellers combined with a keen eye for a range of visual and technical theatrical techniques bring the vivid, colourful and diverse Dickensian world smack-bang into the twenty-first century.

I particularly enjoyed the on-stage, beat-box sound effects, mimicking the noises made by a character, for example the shutting of doors, the chewing of gum or the shutting of a drawer. This worked to expose a Dickensian fascination with the quirky idiosyncrasies of character, emphasising curious, yet often unobserved characteristics.

The carefully selected music plays a significant role in the play, effectively echoing the characters’ emotions and journeys through the narrative. Also be ready for one big musical surprise in the second half…Curious?

‘Curiosity Shop’ is set in an outdated record shop owned by the endearing, gentle ‘grandpa’, an old man desperate and struggling to provide for his orphaned granddaughter Nell. Resorting to gambling as a means to gain money, Grandpa crosses wires with the evil antagonist, Quilp and sinks deeper and deeper in debt.

Quilp becomes the ultimate expression of a Dickensian fascination with character. Derek Frood’s performance as Quilp leaves the audience squirming with disgust at his blatant evil, although, at times they are forced into an uncomfortable laughter. I particularly enjoyed how one member of the audience hissed at Quilp’s appearance on stage. I couldn’t help but laugh at this pantomime expression of anger and thought to myself ‘how wonderfully Dickensian’ and ‘how wonderfully human’?  The audience’s involvement not only within the play but in their relationships to the characters proves its success.

Don’t be put off if you are a novice to Dickens. Theatre Alibi opens an engaging pathway into the themes explored by Dickens and no previous understanding of ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ is needed to enjoy the play.

If this review has left you curious, I highly recommend a trip to Northcott theatre. Or even if it’s just to impress your mates with a few chat up lines from the play’s very own love master, Swiveller, a ticket to see ‘Curiosity Shop’ should definitely be at the top of your shopping list.

Francesca De-Rosa

Quotes taken from the “Curiosity Shop” programme.

Spirited production rekindles childhood memories

If you can find the elusive New Theatre, tucked in a hidey-hole of little streets by the quay, then you are in for a treat. Home to the Cygnet Training Theatre (which I can happily declare doesn’t steal the babies of swans at the quay and teach them to act, despite the name), this is a cosy place with the lively buzz of a creative working space.

“Memories of Childhood” is an exquisitely acted and imaginatively devised piece of non-linear theatre. It was created in response to the poetry collection of the same name recently published by Riptide, so Cygnet Theatre Company had some fantastic writing to use as a starting point.

Photo by rcvnl on flickr

It was their dramatic use and interpretation of the poems, though, which made the piece so inspired. The poems were embellished with backstory and transformed creatively into dialogue, dance, movement and song. This was so carefully crafted that if you didn’t know the piece was based on poems, you probably wouldn’t realise.

Although the storytelling was non-linear, the piece revisited some characters several times and told families’ stories through various points of view. Gradually we became familiar with the fears, habits, tempers and secrets of the very real people on stage. This slow unfolding of character, not unlike how characterisation unfolds in a novel, was one of the show’s charms.

The varied use of sound, costume, movement, dance and props was continually a delight. The sound ranged from folk songs to fuzzy old-fashioned recordings to a live cellist and flautist to the actors singing children’s clapping songs.

The costume, lighting and sound was always carefully coordinated to the mood of each segment – quite a feat considering that the piece was so varied in tone and mood. It was tense, comforting, surprising, frightening and warmly nostalgic, and it took such wild changes of atmosphere in its stride. After all, this is how our memories of childhood are – a jumble of mixed emotions, disparate events, absurd games and nightmares.

Photo by Enrico Strocchi

This wasn’t just about childhood memories, though. The piece explored the relationships between the old and the young and the intense emotions which entwine and entangle families. We saw a young girl’s damaging relationship with her strict father, a man’s attempts to keep his senile father in his wheelchair, girls and mothers bewildered by grief.

My favourite thing about the piece by far was the sense of childlike play which clearly showed that there were some great imaginations behind this show. There were skipping songs, shadow-puppets, shadow-dances, a masked nightmare-monster, imaginary friends, a movement piece which explored the way we play with the sea, and much more.

In short, this show was a joy to watch. It avoided being too cringingly or sweetly nostalgic, delving into the darker sides of childhood and also the difficulties of parenthood. At the same time, though, I think it’s safe to say most audience members left with a glow, partly through the fact that the show’s childhood memories resonated with all of us – I personally was shamelessly thrilled once I heard the Popeye song for the first time in years – and partly through seeing such imaginative, capable actors at work.

by Katie Wilkinson

 

Students charged over £280,000 in library fines in last 5 years

The University has accumulated a total of £283,188.55 through library fines since 2008, Exeposé can reveal.

Photo credits to the University of Exeter

Last academic year the library made £63,574 through fines alone, and this academic year they had obtained £25,832 by the beginning of January 2013.

The library has also regularly obtained over £60,000 from library fines annually since 2008. This information was obtained after Exeposé submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOI) to the library.

The library’s Customer Services Manager, Stephen Mossop, stated: “Library resources, no matter how extensive, are finite, and the library is under an obligation to ensure that they are held in common for the benefit of all members of the University.”

He also explained: “We often waive fines where there are extenuating circumstances or where we are convinced that there has been a genuine misunderstanding. Last year we waived fines totaling almost £22,000 for such reasons.”

Mossop outlined that the money accumulated through fines is used to help “facilitate purchases identified from direct student requests under the ‘I Want One Of These’ scheme.”

Some of the money collected on particular days is also given to charity, and approximately £700 was raised for Children in Need and other RAG charities last November.

Mossop explained that the money is “used across the range of library services that are in place to support students, such as book and journal spending, study space provision, equipment and facilities.”

The library cannot, however, provide an exact breakdown of where and how this money is spent.

Some students have expressed dissatisfaction with this lack of transparency. A second year English student commented on the fines: “It’s ridiculous that we aren’t able to see exactly where this large amount of money is going. How can we know if it is benefitting us at all? Those who have accumulated £50 library fines for forgetting about a ready text for a short amount of time deserve to know what their money is going towards.”

Imogen Sanders, VP Academic Affairs, commented: “Having sat on the Library Budget Governance Group, I have seen how the library is making considerable investments to ensure that students are at the forefront of its expenditures.”

One great scheme in particular is Library Champions, which allows students to tell the library which books they want them to buy if they don’t already have them.”

By Clara Plackett, Arts editor

The Prisoner of Heaven: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

This month we welcome our newest team member Edward Seymour, Senior Reviewer. His challenge: to report back on the books he discovers every month. Now that he is one month into the New Year, how is his resolution to read more books holding up? And what did he make of January’s offering?

I’ve never got round to making a new years resolution before. The intention is usually there but I tend to forget about it until mid January by which time I’ve lost all motivation. January is miserable enough as it is without giving up chocolate or dragging yourself to the gym four times a week! This year though I decided to jump on the band wagon. I set myself the challenge of reading a new book every fortnight, and each month I’ll be reviewing one of my favorites.

For my first review I’ve chosen Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Prisoner of Heaven. Published in 2011 this is the third book in his series which follows on from The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game. Set in Barcelona during the first half of the 20th century, the series centers around the mysterious Cemetery of Forgotten Books, and the life of Daniel Sempere, a lover of literature who works at his father’s book shop. The historical backdrop of a post civil war Spain, under the rule of General Franco, provides the perfect setting for the thriller.

Its Christmas, 1957, Daniel has married his childhood sweetheart, and they live together with their son in a flat above the bookshop. Daniel’s best friend, Fermin Romero de Torres, is preparing for his own impending wedding. The shop is struggling to sell a single novel when a strange, crippled man enters and purchases the shop’s most valuable book, a copy of Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, he leaves the book at the shop and signs it: “For Fermin Romero de Torres, who came back from among the dead and who holds the key to the future”. As Daniel unravels the man’s past he also begins to uncover truths about Fermin’s life before the two met. These truths are marked by the horrors of life as a political prisoner at Montjuic Castle under the vicious rule of prison governor Mauricio Valls. By chance Fermin was imprisoned along with another of Zafon’s characters from a previous book, David Martin. Despite the rapid disappearance of Martin’s sanity the two prisoners plot Fermin’s escape.

Fermin’s past reveals a deeper secret linking Daniel and prison governor Valls setting the stage for a fourth book. Zafón claims that each book in the series can be read in any order, so in theory you could read The Prisoner of Heaven first, despite it being the third in the series. Having read all three I would still advise starting with the first book, The Shadow of The Wind. Zafón’s writing style has been criticized for its exaggerated melodrama, the series is packed with cliches and eccentric characters. Personally though I found it refreshing, as Zafón seems to revel in his stereotyping and as a result has produced another book that completely absorbs the reader.

Overall I enjoyed The Prisoner of Heaven, Zafón has recreated many of the characteristics which made The Shadow of The Wind so successful, and whilst the first book is still by far the best in the series The Prisoner of Heaven was a great way to kick off my new years resolution.

By Edward Seymour – Senior Reviewer
Ed. by Georgina Holland – Exeposé Online Books Editor

Review: Life of Pi

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which won the Booker Prize in 2001, has an eye catching and appealingly unique premise. My copy of the book has a short, simple blurb that begins with the tagline, “One boy, One boat, One tiger”. This is the story in a nutshell; what happens when a teenage boy and a tiger are forced to share a lifeboat after a devastating shipwreck, and how on earth does the boy survive? When plans were set in motion to adapt Martel’s novel for the big screen many questioned whether this strikingly strange scenario was filmable.

Photo credits to 20th Century Fox

How many times have we been told that a book cannot survive the transformation into a movie? Yet sometimes the best adaptations are those that seem impossible, because the filmmakers are forced to be as creative as the original author to make the essence of the source material work on screen. Ang Lee’s interpretation of Life of Pi marries the best of the visual and the written word, and in my view can truly be counted as a great adaptation.

Most critics have praised the stunning aesthetics of the film. Lee and his team succeed in bringing to life Indian streets, a zoo, the vast Pacific Ocean and modern day Canada in an at once vivid, realistic and evocative style. Life of Pi is also that rare thing, a 3D film that actually makes effective use of the technology. Sprawling storms, which seem like works of art in themselves, throw froth and rain in your face. The underwater world bubbles and brims with colourful life. Waves lap and crash in lifelike ways, horizons shift and glow in the setting sun. Most importantly of all, animals look, sound and feel alive. When they move they seem like wild, unpredictable creatures rather than computer generated pixels. Some of the footage from the trailers made the animals look like artificial, CGI creations and it is a tremendous relief that in the film itself they are believable. If they were not, Life of Pi’s narrative centre would lose all of its force.

But before the meat of Life of Pi’s key premise, we are introduced to our protagonist, Piscine, or Pi, as he makes himself known. The details of his early life are quirky and interesting, even without his extraordinary adventure at sea. Lee takes a bit of time setting things up, just as Martel does in the book. Rafe Spall plays an unnamed writer, listening to an adult Pi as he tells his story. Irrfan Khan plays the grown up Pi and the first chunk of the film consists of nostalgic flashbacks, with Khan’s voiceover draped over the top. Many films that indulge in voiceover are lazy, awful affairs that can be painful to watch. However, Life of Pi mostly maintains the balance perfectly. The conversation between Spall and Khan simply stirs our curiosity, and rarely outstays its welcome. The narration is also a nice nod to the novel and makes sense given the nostalgia of the piece.  Khan’s voiceover also disappears once Pi is stranded alone at sea.

As everyone knows by now, Pi is not left entirely alone with his self pity. He makes it across the Pacific in the company of Richard Parker, the tiger from his father’s zoo. This section of the film, with Pi isolated and no other human characters to interact with, could have dragged, especially without the existential introspection of the novel. However, my interest rarely waned. Lee conjures a powerfully primal confrontation between Pi and Richard Parker, a confrontation that morphs into an odd form of companionship. He sets it all against a backdrop that is beautiful, bleak and overwhelming. You feel Pi’s fear initially (I physically recoiled when the tiger first leapt out of the screen in all its 3D glory) and admire his compassion and reason, as he realises Richard Parker might just save his life. Pi questions his spirituality and everything about his life; he hallucinates and dreams. Of course the novel had the time to go into more detail, but nothing here feels significantly incomplete.

The ending has proved divisive, as endings often are. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian is needlessly harsh with his two-star rating of the film because he found the ending “exasperating”. I may be a mere apprentice compared to Bradshaw but he has undoubtedly missed the point. I do not wish to spoil the ending so I will simply say that it is intentionally frustrating and is clearly designed to provoke questions and debate. It highlights the power of storytelling and examines the nature and value of truth. Indeed, Life of Pi is a film with many intelligent themes, from spirituality to inter-species relations. It is also laced with fun, nostalgia and warmth. In fact, name an emotion you can experience at the cinema and Life of Pi probably covers it at some point.

For these reasons, Life of Pi is a film that you can mull over quietly by yourself or debate passionately with friends. It is a varied and unique cinematic experience, expertly told, that I would highly recommend seeing before the hustle and bustle of campus takes hold again in 2013.

My Rating: 4/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Average: 4/5 stars

Liam Trim, Screen Editor

You can read a review of the original novel, courtesy of Exeposé Books, here. 

The rise of self-publishing

Writers such as Francesco Piscitelli have joined a history of brilliant self-published authors.

The world of reading is changing, and it is changing fast. The book market is moving at an exponential rate onto the internet with sales of E-Books rising by 188% in the first 6 months of this year – matched by a steady decline in the sales of hard-copy books*. Along with this change comes a growing phenomenon: self-publishing.

Gone is the time when writers had only the means of securing a traditional publishing contract in which literary agents and their authors will commit to printing thousands of hard-copies of books. Now, writers are presented with a new option – the option to upload their work to the web, self-edit and market, and print “on demand” only when a book is sold. For a higher price, writers can have their work edited and have their layout and graphics designed by a bespoke self-publishing company (once again, web based.)

The country’s leading Publishing companies have not only responded to this change, but have embraced it with both Harper Collins and Penguin creating websites dedicated to the production of unsolicited freelance work from upcoming writers not yet represented by a literary agent. It is important to note that 50 Shades of Grey began as fan fiction that was then picked up by an agent and sent into the sonisphere of global publishing. As well as this, self-published writers such as crime fiction writer Kerry Wilkinson, are joining a history of brave literary figures who dared to self-fund and publish their own works, including Virginia Woolf, Beatrix Potter and, more recently, John Grisham.

One writer who has joined the self-publishing market is Francesco Piscitelli whose sci-fi thriller Cryptids is already flying off Amazon’s cyber-shelves. The story centers around three down-and-out teenagers who plan to leave their dead-end lives behind when they discover that their biological parents are residing in Paris. Taking the journey by foot they are soon embroiled in to much larger, and dangerous, mystery; the reason? Oh yeah, they can each morph into animals. I asked Piscitelli what made him choose to go down the route of self-publishing and what this has meant for his writing. Piscitelli told me that “taking the direction to self-publish seemed pretty much a-given and it was a matter of convenience, really. I’m still astonished at how easy it is to self-publish a piece of work nowadays. Once upon a time going through the intricacies of publishing and editing was the hard part, and now it’s the other way around – writing it was the “hard” part (although I still enjoyed every minute of it), while the process of formatting and uploading the file to Amazon was finished within a mere 12 hours!”

For Piscitelli and many new self-published writers the sense of writing as being instant and direct is very important, he explained that “it definitely gives writers a chance to share and distribute their work quickly, efficiently and to a wider market previously impossible via paper (for example within 12 hours, I made my novel available to the UK, America, Canada, India, France, Spain, Denmark and Italy, whereas if it was on paper, shipping would take an indefinite amount of time and money).” Infact Piscitelli began by going down the traditional publishing route by sending off the first three chapters to about 10 agencies: “Getting a publishing contract is not the finish line, however. After that it would have been another 6 (or possibly more) months before my novel would have been ready to be printed, distributed and released to the public. This way, as an e-book, people can enjoy the first instalment of The Cryptids Series as soon as it was edited and ready to read, and my sales and marketing strategies are up to me.” Here Piscitelli raises an important aspect which attracts many writers to making the decision to self-publish, an ability to be totally in control of their creative work. He told me that “although straightforward, the market is extremely competitive, especially for fantasy genres. On the other hand at least I’m in total control of what happens, and that lends me some comfort.”

This signals a change towards a new reading experience, one that mirrors the experience of using the internet as writers now write in response to their readers with instant electronic feedback and imput through sites such as Twitter, Amazon reviews, and blogs. Piscitelli told me that many writers are now so reliant on the use of social media and web-based marketing strategies, it is hard to imagine a time when this was not a case (“I know of a lot of authors via Twitter who work full-time and simply do not have the free time to seal a publishing contract with an external agency.”)  Thanks to the rise in self-publishing and the options that it presents to authors, readers are taking control and seizing the chance to take on the role of writer.

 

Article by Georgina Holland, Exeposé Online Books Editor.

To download Piscitelli’s novel visit: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cryptids-Origins-Part-1-ebook/dp/B009MPXIVC

*E-book figure taken from:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9550154/E-book-sales-up-188-per-cent.html

For more information on the self-publishing industry read: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/your-money/the-rise-in-self-publishing-opens-the-door-for-aspiring-writers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

And the winner is…

Hilary Mantel has won the 2012 Man Booker Prize! This is an historic win for Mantel as the first British author to have to have won two prizes for two sequel novels. Mantel won her first Man Booker back in 2009 for the history novel “Wolf Hall.”  This year she summoned up the character of Thomas Cromwell once more to create the dazzling sequel “Bring up the Bodies”.

So what does this fantastic win mean for the writer? Well, Mantel is sure to receive an overwhelming amount of media attention, as well as a £50,000 cheque, and an unprecedented leap in the book sales of the winning novel. Whilst accepting her award Mantel joked “Well I don’t know, you wait 20 years for a Booker Prize and two come along at once!” While Mantel may be remaining cool, calm, and collectedly modest about her big win, the Chairman of Judges, Sir Peter Stothard, described her as “arguably our greatest Modern English writer.” Praise indeed and with one more book in the Tudor sequel to come, could Hilary Mantel become the first ever British writer to win a Man Booker prize hat-trick?

For more information on the Man Booker prize, the 2012 shortlist, and Mantel’s win visit the website.

Video footage taken from the BBC coverage of the Man Booker award ceremony, 2012.

Goldhaven Beach – Agnes Pye

Photo by cobalt123 via Flickr.

This week we asked Exeter’s budding writers to think about the theme of ‘memory’. Exepose Books loved Agnes’ descriptions of the naivety and simplicity of youth. This short story of nostalgia is the perfect remedy for those October rainy-day-blues and being bogged down by formative essays, bills, and compulsory reading. Enjoy…

Goldhaven Beach

On one of our numerous holidays in Wales, we visited one Goldhaven beach, which happened to be covered in dead jellyfish.

The sand was a dampened-eyelash brown, the sky an expanse of clouds unfurling like screwed up paper, and below the rocks where our parents lounged, finding silence behind their sunglasses, the countless jellyfish flecked the sand like dirty boiled sweets. Some gathered around the shallow pools where the sand met the rocks, as if ominously queuing for a postmortal baptism. My sister and I were getting along that day, and we laughed together as we paddled in the familiar, if dirty, crust of Wales – a safe distance from our oldest sibling, whom we had taken to taunting.

Maria stalked alone on the other side of the rocks. We were little more than an inconvenience in her world, but one sufficient to eventually provoke a response, and as we crept up to her for the final time, she likewise veered our way. Maria walked like she was trying to unscrew a stubborn jar, the fresh fat on her hips tautening her jeans to sugar paper.

When she was about a yard away, she crouched down to inspect the jellyfish at her feet, and we leaned in, delightedly horrified that she would dare touch it. Then Maria deftly gripped the sides of the corpse, and abruptly launched it in our direction. We squealed and lurched backwards, despite the weakness of the toss; the heavy bulk merely toppled less than a foot from its original place. In this displacement however, the repulsive entrail-like tangle of tentacles became exposed; the complex biological instrumentation that enabled the creature’s mysterious life as an angel-like entity in a vast, alien world.

I didn’t think about that life, any more than I thought about how our trusted crests dragged up its remains. Or the lives of my parents, the neurotic novelties who flapped maps and threw our days together.

Nor did I wonder what we were doing on a jellyfish-covered beach in remote Wales. At least not until post-teens; post-jeans. At which point, submerged in my new, safe dark world, I wondered why they did it. Was it the terse fulfilment of small, synced dreams reciprocally reflected in their sunglasses? Or was it so that, when the waves eventually brought me in, I would have something to come back to.

By Agnes Pye.

If you are interested in seeing your creative work featured in Exepose Online, email Georgina at exepose-books@xmedia.ex.ac.uk

Tess of the d'Urbevilles vs. 50 Shades of Grey

What does Hardy’s literary classic and James’ romping read have in common?

Following the huge success of the 50 Shades of Grey series, Waterstones has seen a threefold increase of sales of another novel: Thomas Hardy’s classic “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”. This is altogether unsurprising seeing as the 50 Shades protagonist Ana is said to have been studying the novel and many references to Tess are scattered across the book like breadcrumbs. It’s true that, like 50 Shades, Tess of the d’Urbervilles was considered incredibly risqué to its 19^th century audience and was initially censored due to its blunt dealing of sexuality. However, those who are expecting Tess to be full of raunchy sex scenes and millionaire boyfriends will be sorely disappointed. In fact, these books are hardly closely connected at all. Tess Durbeyfield is a young innocent Wessex girl who, believing she is distantly related to a well-to-do family, the d’Urbervilles, finds employment in their house as a poultry-maid. There she is introduced to Alec d’Urberville, a libertine who harasses her. Tess is unaware of her dangerous situation and one day Alec takes advantage of her, raping her and thereby ruining Tess’ chances of true future happiness. This is a tragic tale of the injustice faced by women in society – a frank dealing of Victorian double-standards. E.L. James attempts to find parallels between Tess’ victimisation and Anastasia’s subordination to Christian’s advances. Those with a more thorough knowledge of Hardy’s classic will agree that she is completely unsuccessful. Fans of the 50 Shades of Grey series will find the Marquis de Sade’s “The Crimes of Love” a more satisfying and relevant read.

 

Review by Mailee Osten-Tan. Both 50 Shades of Grey and Tess of the d’Urbevilles are available to purchase in Exeter’s Waterstones store as well as online

Lyrics, laughter and laments

If you had been a deaf fly on the wall behind Andy Brown and Don Paterson in the Voodoo Lounge at the Phoenix last night, just the audience’s glowing faces would’ve shown you the musicality, quality, humour and poignancy contained in the evening’s poetry.

Photo credits to Corinna Wagner

Andy Brown, the Director of Creative Writing at Exeter University, read selections from collections including his most recent, The Fool and the Physician, and from his new work on domestic scenery and the details of peoples’ homes in the ‘exurbs’, the communities beyond the suburbs. His poetry was refreshingly rich in sound echoes and rhyme; some of his poems rhymed the same sound throughout the whole poem, or contained refrains, making it a pleasure to experience the works read aloud rather than on the page.

Brown’s use of the constraints of form allowed for more musicality and intriguing thought-puzzles, as well as being fascinating in their own right (if you can tell me what an englynion is without Wikipedia, well, I’ll award you tickets to Exeter’s next poetry reading). The imagery was vivid and the underlying thoughts were handled softly and subtly. The effect of this was palpable throughout the event in the audience’s sighs, laughs and enchanted expressions.

Don Paterson’s reading was one of stark contrasts, as he read selections from his award-winning body of work. His often self-effacing, tongue-in-cheek and playful poetic voice gave way in moments to poems of sincere and touching sadness, such as “Mercies”, written about the death of his dog, a poem which it was clear many of the audience could relate to.

Photo credits to Corinna Wagner

Some of the poems were delicately understated, avoiding sentimentality and instead, out of words, conjuring tangible emotion, which we could all step into as listeners. He read with informality and as though he was among friends, and his lack of ritual made the audience comfortable and cosy, with strangers exchanging names and stories during the interlude.

The spaces between poems were almost as enjoyable as the poems themselves, as Paterson and Brown quipped about their pet poetic peeves, while the audience filled the intimate space with warm laughter and comic responses. Paterson showed his dry Scottish wit in remarks such as (pre-sonnet-reading) “I’ve been writing sonnets. I don’t know why…I don’t even like sonnets! …On a good day I’m indifferent about the damn things.”

The sonnet was an ode to American TV drama House and its star Hugh Laurie, (who Paterson said had been cosmically misfiled as a sex god!) ranging from the comedy of “stop the chemo, he just needs to fart” to a sober ending: “let that thousand and one-inch stare see through us too, for we don’t have a prayer.”

Though unafraid to show he’s a poet well-versed in American TV shows (“I’ve given up reading…mostly ’cause it was taking up my TV time”), Paterson also engages with politics, technology and philosophy through his poetry. These poems often come with sharp, witty satirical bite, such as in “A Scholar”, a poem written in response to a negative and ill-informed review, and “The Big Listener”, a poem whose preamble featured the words “If Tony Blair was Stalin…”

After the reading, a brief Q&A session allowed the poets to talk further about their writing habits and processes, telling the audience that their poetic muses usually stop helping after two lines, and that they don’t know what a poem is going to say until it’s written. They also offered the following counter-intuitive gems of advice to writers. Brown: “The bin is your friend,” (writing badly is good!) and Paterson: “If you’ve got a good idea [before you start], it isn’t!”