Cultured Llama

We send out review copies of all our books with hope and love; sometimes the love comes back to us. The Fire in Me Now by Michael Curtis is reviewed by Rosie Johnston for London Grip:

Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape shows Krapp in old age listening to tapes of his past, musing: Perhaps my best years are gone. But I wouldn’t want them back, not with the fire in me now […]

In the poem Not in Love the narrator tells us about a friend’s adulterous flirtation:

younger of course, single
but they didn’t get it together
on the walking holiday with her husband around

though little was left unsaid
of that I’m certain

The affair is thwarted when the potential lover drowns (presumably on another holiday):

she didn’t seem too upset
because as she pointed out
she’d only been in lust with him
not in love and after all
they hadn’t done anything. 

You can read the full review on London Grip.

The Fire in Me Now costs £8 plus p&p, and can be ordered here: The Fire in Me Now

Cath Barton reviews In Margate by Lunchtime by Maggie Harris for Wales Arts Review. Barton picks out the recurrent theme of birds and animals in the stories:

Birds appear in different guises too – in ‘Alice’ it is people who, to Alice’s drugged mind on a night out, have been transformed, and the Ladies is:

…full with flocks of starlings and parakeets, fingers fluffing hair, unrolling tubes of crimson lipstick.

Later in the story Alice herself, in her flight from the nightclub, takes on animal characteristics:

Her feet became a fawn’s, small-hoofed and dainty as they negotiated the mosaic floor, elbows morphing from bone to feather, giving her flight up the spiralled stairs and out into the foyer where the bouncers turned and opened the door where the wind was waiting.

You can read the full review on Wales Arts Review.

In Margate by Lunchtime costs £10 plus p&p and can be ordered on the book’s page: In Margate by Lunchtime