Volume 06 Issue 1
The SRB Interview: Dan Rhodes
DAN RHODES was born in 1972 and grew up in Devon and Kent. Rhodes graduated in Humanities from the University of Glamorgan in 1994, returning to complete a MA in Writing in 1997. He worked in a number of jobs while he switched between writing what would eventually become his first three books. His debut,...
Volume 6 – Issue 1 – Editorial
WHETHER or not Montaigne was the father of the essay it was surely he who christened it, describing the pieces he wrote in the latter part of the sixteenth century essais. In French the verb simply means to try. As Sarah Bakewell writes in How To Live: or A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty...
SRB Diary: Melting in Melbourne
Not enough has been written about sunburn. That’s understandable in light-starved Britain, but after three cancer-ously hot weeks in Melbourne in November, I became a connoisseur of sun-abraded skin. One grows to appreciate the subtleties of sunburn, how skin cooks, the gradations of pink from radioactive...
Women and Children Last
IN GLASGOW relationships between men and women have traditionally been based on conflict and contempt, not love and affection. The internationally acclaimed relationship researcher Dr John Gottman, has studied couples’ interactions for years and his research shows that the biggest slayer of marriages...
In Broonland
SINCE FIRST the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice and Eng-land. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruins; the Third, which inherits their greatness,...
New Poems – Kona MacPhee & Cheryl Follon
Kona Macphee Scarlet Fever In the office, the slender plot-lines on the charts conspire to veer the wrong way, down, and cross the border into the rough terrain of in-the-red. Now heads will roll, he knows, and of course it’s always the foot soldiers first, no matter how loyal and true, how many years...
Donne Deal
In a now (in)famous review of G. Gre-gory Smith’s Scottish Literature: Character and Influence in 1919, T.S. Eliot asked, “Was there a Scottish Literature?” Had he been posing a similar question today, it might be, “Was there a Scottish Modernism?” Recent shifts in the critical terrain can...
Hearing Voices
The swither is Robin Robertson’s version of negative capability. It suggests a harder and perhaps more violent turning back and forth between certainty and inaction than the Southron habit of ‘dithering’. The cover of Robin Robertson’s third collection of poems Swithering showed a horned, metamorphic...
Look and Learn
RECENT YEARS have seen a groundswell in what we may loosely call Nature Writing. It is what travel writing was to the Eighties and biography to the Nineties. It ranges from Roger Deakin’s free-spirited Waterlog and Wild-wood, to Robert MacFarlane’s Mountains Of The Mind which intercuts a history...
Overlookeringstraat – A Short Story by Dilys Rose
REGARDING THE neighbourhood, Rona does her homework too late. Arriving ahead of the agreed meeting time with the agency rep, she kills the spare time in a canalside bar. It’s a dirty, desolate place. Marine theme junk is festooned with cobwebs thick as ropes, the barman gives her a far from friendly...
Volume 6 – Issue 1 – Gallimaufry
The Hundred Thousand Places Thomas A. Clark CARCANET, £9.95 pp96, ISBN 9781847770059 The Hundred Thousand Places, inspired by walks across the isles and highlands, is a single poem in three parts. Time unfolds gradually in Clark’s verse. His short stanzas, some only a few lines long, illustrate a...