Selected Poems
Kathleen Jamie
Picador, £14.99
A Selected Poems is always a good opportunity to trace a poet’s
trajectory over the years. Jamie is now renowned – justly – as one of
our best poets of Scotland’s landscape and nature. Her poems on
birds – ospreys, swifts, geese, ravens – are alone worth the cover
price. Her earlier books, Black Spiders (1982), The Way We Live (1987)
and The Autonomous Region (1993) show we shouldn’t be so narrow in
categorising her work. The poems – written with fine precision – move
around from Scotland to Istanbul, Jerusalem, Tibet, and the Karakorum
mountains of India and Pakistan. It is no wonder she has such a sharp
eye for the particularities of place. The Bonniest Companie (2015),
her most recent collection, contains poems written during the year of
the Scottish Independence Referendum. There are some excellent
selections, including poems that cast a backward glance at childhood -
the superb The Girls is a treat - and that explore Scottish identity
within the natural world.
Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win The White House
Luke Harding
Faber, £8.99
Between June and December 2016, Richard Steele, an ex-MI6 intelligence
officer, wrote a dossier that examined allegations Donald Trump had a
compromised relationship with Russia and the Kremlin. Steele found
that senior figures in the Kremlin had been “cultivating and
supporting US Republican candidate, Donald Trump for at least five
years.” In this insightful and thorough book, Harding - an expert on
Russian spycraft - uses this dossier as a template to trace the
connections between the Russian secret service, lawyers, oligarchs,
and Trump’s campaign team, some of whom would serve in his cabinet.
Harding goes through the main cast - including Paul Manafort, Michael
Flynn, Jared Kushner - analysing who these people are and what motives
they had for helping Trump get into office. It’s an unnerving story,
full of intrigue, political corruption and dirty money. Moreover,
Harding shows that Trump’s presidency, far from being
anti-establishment, is the murky side of the establishment stepping
out under the spotlight of power.
Tropic of Violence
Nathacha Appanah
Head of Zeus, £11.99
Marie is a nurse who lives on the island of Mayotte, a French
département in the Mozambique Channel. After she struggles to become
pregnant, she adopts a baby called Moïse, given to her by a refugee in
hospital. When Moïse finds out that Marie is not his biological
mother, he starts to resent her and finds a home among a gang of
teenagers in the island’s largest slum, Gaza. Then Marie dies. Moïse
is left wholly alone and becomes embroiled in horrendous violence and
destitution. The novel is narrated from several different voices -
Marie, talking from a state of limbo, a gang leader called Bruce, a
police officer called Olivier, and a Moïse himself – which re-tread
the same ground. Although Appanah’s general style is otherworldly and
poetic, and her control of perspective is brilliant, the novel does
want for a credible distinction between the different narrative
voices. Nevertheless, this is a poignant and terrifying portrait of a
peculiar island.
NICK MAJOR
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