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Ampersand

An Irish Pages Supplement

The Strip

The Two Of Them

“So here we have another book speaking to Mediterranean marriage, with this same entwined sense of delicacy, humour and light mockery. The book, simply called The Two of Them, by Split painter and cartoonist Tisja Kljaković Braić, consists of ninety (mostly black-and-white) cartoons in which there exist, in principle, but two figures. Namely, The Two of Them: A Wife, a woman of unspecified middle age who is at war with surplus kilograms and the metamorphosis of her own body; and A Man, a guy who is, for much of the book, on the couch in his nether garments (or underpants) watching football …”

The Passerine

Sundial and Hourglass

“A micro-epic . . . I don’t think this term has ever previously been used in a literary context, certainly not for a series of micropoems handled in this way; and so, for me, not only the name, but the form itself – a mosaic structure, allowing for celerity and/or dwelling when reading – constitutes something of a genuine formal démarche.”

Feuilleton

The Identitarian Delusion

“Poetry, an art once considered a free space for intellectual, emotional and spiritual enquiry and exploration, seems increasingly an arena governed and to some degree imperilled by thought-police. The ability to invent, or re-imagine, such as would be extended to any novelist, is being constricted.”

The Chorus

The Wild Life of Scots

“No one denies there is Scots speech. The politically motivated ding-dong about whether it’s a language or a dialect or ‘just slang’ is very wearisome. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s a duck.”

The Citadel

The Irish Problem

“There’s a clue in the name itself, Irish. You see, the Irish don’t speak Irish! Not anymore. Less than 10% of the population. A lot less! Why is this? Well, there are lots of reasons.”

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