What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently:
Fiction: ‘Gunk: Three Extracts’ by Gerry Feehily, ‘Unto our Shadows’ by Nicolle Elizabeth
Reviewed: Max Dunbar on Anthony Cartwright’s Heartland
Interviewed: Alan Kelly puts five questions to Last Days of the Cross author Joseph Ridgwell and to Pretty/Scary’s Heidi Martinuzzi
Poetry: ‘Sacred Heart’ by Adelle Stripe, ‘Van Gogh’s Ear V: RS Thomas, the Clint Eastwood of the Spirit by Darran Anderson:
“He got very far as a poet, a loner taking on the universe, a kind of Clint Eastwood of the spirit,” Seamus Heaney commented, having pipped him to the Nobel Prize for Literature (it’s doubtful Thomas would have wanted it nor was it likely the committee would really have given it to so volatile a figure, shortlisted or not). Heaney’s description of the poet is a striking and an apt one. You can see Thomas as this silent drifter on the Welsh hills (”Lord, I was not as most men / when they were working, fighting, drinking / I was in the greenwood, thinking / thought to the bone” - Pharisee), casting a cold eye on the world, not callously but with a bitter clarity that comes when you realise that no-one can be trusted, not even yourself. Forever overshadowed by his gifted namesake Dylan Thomas, there is no easy way in or quick fix to Ronald Stuart’s work, no Under Milk Wood-style radio play, no quotable Do not go gentle into that good night-type villanelle. Trying to tackle his Collected Poems, a great stone tablet of a book, is a daunting task, like one of those spiritual retreats where someone pays to be starved and flayed on a daily basis in the pursuit of transcendence. Instead, short bursts of his verse are best to appreciate its thundering effects.
Stay up-to-date @3ammagazine.
First posted: Sunday, November 15th, 2009.
