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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

The tyrant’s sickest triumph is to make his subjects watchful The landscape of Nick Makoha’s first collection – an abstracted, mythologised yet sometimes bitingly concrete version of Amin’s Uganda – has been scarred by tyranny, to the extent that it adopts the vigilant gaze of its population ‘The stones on the riverbank have seen you’, announces the first line of ‘A Crocodile Eats the Sun’: ‘A praying mantis skating along blue mud / knows your secret’ These might be ironically deflected internalisations, but the point is serious: if you can get rivers and insect life to do your surveillance then martial law becomes superfluous, almost, and self-sustaining Watchmen are important characters in Kingdom of Gravity, taking their place alongside informers and collaborators in the network of acolytes who make a violent world go round ‘Watchmen’ intimates the allure of life on the right side of the tyrant’s law A ringleader (‘the one who Gaddafi knew’) ‘picks up a sheep in the soft grass and tears it apart by the ribs’ His followers lean into the spectacle:   By now all the herders and huntsmen have a gleam in their eyes and have stripped down All their sighs are of victory I am one of them, my hand carrying coals to set up fires   But spectacle is by its nature open to interpretation, and watchfulness can quickly turn to paranoia, seeking meaning where there might be none The men pass round the sheep’s heart:   Those who could see better than hear, read too much into the gesture Some of them let off a few rounds, using whatever their palms and feet could find as drums   In a world of danger and shifting circumstances, sight has to compensate for failures in hearing Hearing is a vulnerable sense, perhaps too close in a warzone to its empathetic relative, listening Seeing, on the other hand, is summary and acquisitive It scans the horizon, makes a snap judgement, and fires off ‘a few rounds’ to be sure   The ‘I’ that strafes through this collection mutates with the settings, striking notes of

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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poetry

October 2014

Roman Nights

Martin Glaz Serup

TR. Christopher Sand-Iversen

poetry

October 2014

4.    It’s New Year’s Eve, I’m standing newly divorced on a roof in a town, we toast the...

poetry

November 2011

One Night Without Incident

Eoghan Walls

poetry

November 2011

Freak July mists blurred all from Portsmouth to Reading in a late summer sky turned wholly unfit for bombing,...

Art

Issue No. 12

Parra!

Parra

Art

Issue No. 12

 

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