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From the Newsletter- January 2005 |
BOOK REVIEWS
... or should that be ‘media reviews’? As you will have seen in the October 2004 Newsletter, Friends of Blaise and the Henbury Conservation Society have produced a video covering the history of Blaise and Henbury.
THE GENIUS OF THE PLACE Written, produced and directed by KEITH SHEATHER 1 hour Friends of Blaise and Henbury Conservation Society Video cassette £15, DVD £20
The synopsis describes this as ‘the story of Blaise and Henbury from the Romans to the present day’ - and what you get is what you see. The video is fronted by David Garmston, well-known BBC Bristol presenter, and is professionally produced.
There are few things here which will be new to a Civic Society viewer, but it’s a most agreeable way of passing an hour and would bear more than one viewing. Amateur actors in period costume add atmosphere to a coach trip along the carriage drive and other scenes.
When I review books, I sometimes comment on the typography as well as the content. The equivalent here, I suppose, is the director’s liking for big close-ups which I found very slightly distracting. And I really must question why the DVD is a full 33% more expensive than the video cassette. Another recent local video production, Bristol, we loves ’ee, sells the two media at the same price.
CITY: Bristol today in poems and pictures. An anthology of new poems by Bristol poets selected and edited by DAVID JOHNSON AND PETER HUNTER 80+xiv pp Paralalia ISBN 0 9548117 0 4 £10.45
Yet another new Bristol publisher - and a splendid debut. Paralalia (www.paralalia.co.uk) is a poetry partnership set up by Bristol poets David Johnson and Peter Hunter ‘to bring poetry to the public ear and eye in new and unusual ways’. But it’s not just poems; each double-page spread has a poem on one side and a magnificent photograph of some aspect of Bristol on the other. The ‘just landscape side of square’ format (21x24cm) is perfect for this.
I don’t feel competent to comment on the poems themselves; I enjoyed many of them and none is ‘difficult’. You can look on this as a book of new poems with some superb photos, or a book of delightful photos with some interesting poems; either way it deserves to be a hit.
ANDRÉ COUTANCHE
Tel: 0117 964 3106
email: andrec@andrec.plus.com
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