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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

Noelle Kocot’s poems are like sunlight coming through a window Indeed, one of Kocot’s primary concerns throughout God’s Green Earth, the New York poet’s eighth full-length collection, is light, and the stillness of living required to observe it We are summoned to ‘look at this kitchen / In its bright survival’ (‘Kitchen’) The light of morning is anthropomorphised as ‘indifferent’, while the entire month of October is ‘pearl-bright’ (‘Poem for —’) A recurring trope throughout the collection is empty domestic space, and light’s inflection on it The image feels apt at a time when we are stuck in our homes, bereft of the habitual punctuation of our days ‘Don’t know how to get back to the other age fluttering / Behind us’, Kocot writes in ‘Transitions’, seeming to speak directly to the not-so distant past ‘Trying to understand, trying to relate, / I fail miserably in the dissembling moment’: I feel the resonance of that ‘dissembling moment’ now, as the day ‘taunts me / With its promise’ (‘Retreat’) at its beginning, and unspools by mid-afternoon   Despite the focus on interior domestic space, these aren’t stagnant or static poems ‘To hobble out of a singular verb, that is called life!’ Kocot tells us in ‘Narcissism’, the spondees leaping along with an oddly apposite glee, creating a feeling of bruised hope This is a typical example of Kocot’s neat and spare poetic line I’m reminded of Baldwin’s adage about wanting to write ‘sentences as clean as bone’, but rather than being picked clean, Kocot’s lines feel sun-bleached from being left out in the open At times they come out as purple as the twilight they describe:   If I could taste the insistences Of dusk, I would rise from the shocked Grass and imagine a shelter of miniature Tides   (‘Paying Attention’)   Throughout the collection, Kocot writes with a soft-spoken clarity, creating a feeling of calmness and reassurance Tonally, it recalls the work of Wendell Berry Compare, for instance, Berry’s ‘The Peace

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

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poetry

May 2017

Two Poems

Vala Thorodds

poetry

May 2017

THROUGH FLIGHT   For a moment we are borne into the air and then down.   It is there, behind...

Interview

December 2017

Interview with Peter Stamm

Seren Adams

Interview

December 2017

Peter Stamm’s international reputation as a writer of acute psychological perception and meticulously precise prose has been growing steadily...

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Issue No. 14

In Search of the Dice Man

Emmanuel Carrère

TR. Will Heyward

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Issue No. 14

Towards the end of the 1960s, Luke Rhinehart was practicing psychoanalysis in New York, and was sick and tired...

 

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