To Coventry, to see an exhibition of contemporary British Art at the Herbert Gallery — and to discover, in an adjacent room, an exhibition of over 100 small drawings by Prashant Kansara. These images come from a series “challenging collective political and societal acceptance of the horrors that war and genocide inflict upon children”. And I can tell you it’s a pretty powerful series. I gazed into every one. The exhibition is on until 8 November 2026.
‘To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs’ — the final words of Species of spaces, by Georges Perec (trans John Sturrock, Penguin 1997, p92).
Meself, I’d be inclined to make it ‘regain or retain’ in the first clause.
Writing Space Press, a new independent publishing enterprise, has recently published Reading space: an anthology of contemporary poetry and prose. I have two pieces included: ‘Moth’, and ‘The sisters are neighbours but no longer on speaking terms’. Aside from some formatting quirks, and a strange bit of editing in ‘Moth’, it’s a very decent debut, and it will be interesting to see what their next venture will be.