Reviews Articles
Honouring death through dance
Soul Play is a gentle and intimate dance-theatre duet that explores the moments following a young man’s death. Kate Flatt devised it in response to her own grief upon the death of family members. A secondment at a local hospice as part of a Rayne Choreographic fellowship encouraged this...
Lent talks on BBC Radio 4
Novelist Will Self could be labelled an angry old man. But he has charisma and can certainly put over an argument. The ingenious suggestion he makes in the first BBC Radio 4 Lent talks (24 February) is that we are worshipping art rather than God these days. The churches are empty; the...
The O of Home
The O of Home by Jennifer Kavanagh. O Books. ISBN: 978 1 884694 264 8. £11.99 When I went to Jennifer Kavanagh’s launch of this book at the Quaker Centre I wasn’t sure what to expect. Home – how would I define it? Is it the flat above the Meeting house? Is it a place...
Truth as a crescent moon
I took part in a master class the other day. Me and about a thousand others. In a packed auditorium, we practised the sound of one hand clapping. We pointed our right hand at the stage and concentrated on being fully present in the exact point and moment. We clenched...
The night is full of stars
‘The Night is Full of Stars’ by Friedrich Schmitz-Hertzberg. Sessions of York, Ebor Press Division. ISBN: 978 1 85072 397 4 Price: £9.99 plus £2.50 UK postage & packing. There is something vaguely familiar, and slightly unsettling, about the face on the cover of this book. The eyes, looking at something just behind your left ear,...
Window on the Square
Window on the Square by Alice Beer. Soundswrite Press. ISBN 978 0 9550786 3 7. £3. Alice Beer is a one-off. She is not like any other poet I can think of: she has a totally individual voice, a voice of simple, unassuming, unselfconscious Quaker authority. She writes about the square where she lives, whose moods...
Small but perfectly formed
Celebrating the Quaker Way by Ben Pink Dandelion. Quaker Books. ISBN 978 1 90712302 3 £2.50. Quakers like their theology pocket sized. I’m sure that’s why Advices & queries is so special. There’s something very Quakerly about a mobile text. In this tiny book Ben starts immediately to praise the riches of...
The Water Table
The Water Table by Philip Gross. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 1 85224 852 1. £8.95. Philip Gross has had a distinguished career as a writer and teacher while managing to avoid becoming a household name. He has written fiction, children’s opera, radio plays, horror and science fiction as well as poetry. The Water Table,...
‘I believe God will save every person’
If The Church Were Christian by Philip Gulley, HarperOne, ISBN 978 006 169 8767. £14.98. Indiana Quaker pastor and author Philip Gulley has been shaking the foundations of midwestern US Quakerism for almost ten years. This book could produce another much needed shaking there. In the 1990s Philip Gulley published a popular series of...
Sacred heart
Anyone who has experienced semana santa (holy week) in Spain will appreciate the extraordinarily dramatic way in which the story of the Passion of Christ is depicted in colourful processions through the streets. Dating back to the sixteenth century, they are at there most Catholically extravagant in Andalusia – especially...