When asked to describe his approach to writing, Heaney replied that it was ‘like being an altar boy in the sacristy getting ready to go out onto the main altar’. His translation of Aeneid VI is certainly worthy of that description, steeped as it is in humility and respect for its author. There is more of Heaney in this than the boy in the sacristy, though: it is a gift for all whom he taught, and who taught him. He reminds us in his preface of the debt owed to his Latin teacher at A Level, who was ‘forever sighing, ‘Och, boys, I wish it were Book VI’’ they were studying, instead of Book IX – this is a last piece of homework, completed fifty years late. It was, however, also an ‘impulse’, brought on by the birth of his first granddaughter. Heaney, in breathing life into Book VI, is very much aware of his own, ever changing relationship with the text, as well as how much he has changed. In this book – neither ‘version nor crib’, he becomes both Aeneas and Anchises: at once headstrong schoolboy, loving father, and grandfather.

His style is unadorned, Latinate expressions couched in earthy, almost onomatopoeic utterances. Charon, in language which surely rivals the original, is ‘surly, filthy and bedraggled’, clothed in ‘a grimy cloak’. Plain, blunt to the point of aggression, they typify a manner which is both rural and sophisticated. Earlier, the Golden Bough is ‘green-leafed’ and ‘refulgent’ in the same breath. Heaney’s word choice, to my mind, reveals yet more markedly his love-hate relationship with Book VI – why he thought it ‘the best of books and the worst of books’: smatterings of ostentation remind us that it was, he thought ‘worst because of its imperial certitude, its celebration of Rome’s manifest destiny’. It remains best, though for the ‘twilit fetch of its language’, and this is something Heaney has unequivocally mastered.

Heaney – dare I say it – might even trump Virgil in this respect, at least as far as the final portion of the book goes: he makes all these empty platitudes palatable. I found, in Anchises’ potted history of Roman victories, moments where Heaney turned this into something more than just the beleaguered scribblings of a ‘sixth form homunculus’ – moments like ‘Fabricius, the indomitable and frugal’, a pairing far richer than Virgil’s own ‘powerful in poverty’ (parvoque potentem). I don’t mean to provoke any classicists’ complaints, it’s just that it works, really really well. Heaney is the master of using an intriguing, atypical word to render the ordinary as something more. Here, amidst a conscious programme of Augustan propaganda, he grapples with, and, I think, truly succeeds in making this vision Anchises presents – he bemoaned it as ‘something of a test for reader and translator alike’ – a triumph of ordinary marvels over imperial.

Anchises, who lingers ‘fatherly and intent’, must have been a difficult figure to write up for Heaney. Their first moment of meeting, tender as it is, is shot through with reminders of the father’s mortality. The moment of their embrace, where Anchises passes through Aeneas ‘like a breeze between his hands’ cannot be read without thinking of Heaney’s absence. The whole book now functions as a kind of farewell letter, this episode – of the intermingling of death and life – is poignant in its prescience.

There are, however, moments which are poignant in and of themselves. No more so than Aeneas’ unrequited entreaties to Dido. When she blanks him – the greatest ‘bitch, please’ moment in literature – she does so ‘no more than if her features had been carved in flint or Parian marble’. Heaney has Virgil’s knack for condensing whole emotional cataclysms into a mere sentence: here, ‘flint’ suggests the former flame of her passion; it becomes ‘marble’, cold and unresponsive. These are words crafted to inspire close reading; they also demand to be read aloud. The speeches, especially the Sibyl’s, are truly magnificent in scope – try Ian McKellen’s version, recorded for Radio 4, for a suitably impassioned attempt – and phrases like ‘an elm, copious, darkly aflutter’ float on the tongue as much as in the mind.

Undoubtedly, then, Heaney overcomes ‘the fleeting, fitful anxieties that afflict the literary translator’. And translator, I think, is too paltry a word: though Heaney typically dismisses it as nothing more than ‘classics homework’, it is far more than an homage. At the final line, the last few words, ‘sterns cushion on sand’ are the same phrasing Heaney uses as the ships first land in Italia in the first few lines. His repetition is not Virgil’s own. It is, I think, Heaney suggesting that this journey he has undertaken, alongside Aeneas, from young to old, is only the beginning. If this is a farewell letter, its final note is one of hope.

“I’m a wreck – what did you expect?”

Yeah, we get it. Iggy Pop is old. However, so much of the build-up and reaction to Post Pop Depression has either previewed, or filtered, Iggy’s seventeenth studio effort through this lens that it is easy to forget that this is a damn fine album – not a damn fine album for his age, or when compared to recent Iggy Pop output, but a damn fine album full stop.

So much of this is due to this album’s musical backbone, which the LP’s own artwork puts front and centre – a list consisting of Joshua Homme, Iggy Pop, Dean Fertita and Matt Helders is hardly one to hide in the liner notes. With two Queens of the Stone Age and an Arctic Monkey, the fact that the record is imbued with a tantalising darkness, both musically and in the latter’s production, is no surprise. However, it is a testament to the band’s balancing of talents that this has not become a QotSA album – from the deep, drawling delivery of his lyrics, to passages bordering on spoken word poetry, to the same propulsive energy which has always powered his discography, this is certainly today’s indie rock giants backing Iggy Pop, and not the other way around.

Be thankful, then, that Iggy Pop doesn’t waste this musical base – indeed, he builds upon it. Barbed ruminations such as “This street is as cold as a corporate lawsuit” and “I followed my shadow and it led me here / What is the problem if I disappear?” envelop the darkness, while building arresting motifs of cynicism and legacy. Indeed, both music and vocals, the latter as much intoned as sung, intertwine to create some startlingly catchy hooks – see ‘Gardenia’ and ‘American Valhalla’. This retooled sound is thus far more poppy than the title would suggest. While Iggy and his crew do sometimes surrender to the temptation of repeating these musical phrases just a little too readily (it’s hard to make constantly shouting the word “vulture” meaningful) it’s hard to resent such infectious riffs and choruses.

In short, Post Pop Depression marks both the birth of an unlikely pop supergroup, and the rebirth of a titan, a work which stands on its own two feet whilst being a worthy addition to the discographies of the creatives involved. Just don’t mention Iggy’s age. To quote ‘Chocolate Drops’: “it’s just some old excuse, hanging on. Let it go.”

With a tight budget of $1 million and a terrifying vision, Robert Eggers proves himself to be a natural-born film maker, intelligent and ambitious enough to create a truly immersive viewing experience that will linger long after you leave the movie theatre. The Witch is a ‘folklore tale’ about a zealously pious family who were excommunicated from a Puritan community, now living in self-exile on a farm somewhere in New England. When the youngest of the clan mysteriously disappears, fear and paranoia set in and the family begins to unravel. It soon becomes clear that something unnatural is at work and not long before accusations of witchcraft put the family on a road to no return.

What is so striking about this horror film is that, well, it’s pitched as a ‘horror’ film at all. The Witch defies all the exhausted conventions of the genre that audiences have become begrudgingly accustomed to. Thankfully, a recent new-wave of horror has emerged from arthouse directors and Eggers debut serves as another welcome addition to the trend. Film makers are increasingly ditching the tired methods of the genre and are instead opting for a deeply psychological slow-burn approach that tends to negotiate the horror inside us all.

The renovation has experienced success at Sundance, with The Babadook, It Follows, Goodnight Mommy, and now The Witch – for which Eggers won best director – all being met with an overwhelmingly positive critical response and an equally appreciative horror audience. Presumably both were desperate for something a little different from the jump-scare drivel that has clogged the genre for a while. Whether it’s the American teen gore romps (Cabin Fever,the Hostel series,) or uninspired, lazy found-footage fluff (was The Blair Witch Project really that good?), the slow-burn is emphatically distinct, with thematic substance, style and mood satiating the horror fan’s desire for intellect as well as thrill. This brand of film demands patience, but the pay-off is much more substantial.                  

This certainly applies to The Witch. Eggers’ ability to create, stimulate and toy with a certain mood and then to sustain it from the opening titles to the explosive finale is one of the films many impressive feats. The entire picture is characterised by an overwhelming gloom, largely created by a subtle greyness in colour and the long sliding shots of the vast rural landscape. Both the farm-house and the sorcerous woods that lie beyond are seen and discussed so frequently that they become another character, a tempestuous presence that has an unspoken dark power. This is coupled with an intelligent use of silence beneath the rough Northern accents and seventeenth century dialect, further saturating the piece with melancholic heaviness.

This is intersected, however, by violent bouts of suspense, drama and terror. Eggers creates seamless transitions from the pensive quiet into a nightmare of cacophonic violins, religious Omen-esque choirs and even a meshing of screams at particularly tense moments. Whilst the miserable tone is sustained, Eggers skilfully uses such techniques to energise the film with blood-curdling fright, never letting us forget that this is indeed a horror movie and that yes, we should be scared.

Yet unlike much of mainstream horror, Eggers ensures that style is matched by thematic substance. At its very core, The Witch is a harrowing drama. The viewer is a voyeur, observing a family in crisis who are battling the demons within the domestic space more so than any external evil. Mother and father William (Ineson) and Katherine (Dickie) are adjusting to a new environment with their little tykes Thomasin (Taylor-Joy), Caleb (Scrimshaw) and twins Mercy (Grainger) and Jonas (Dawson). Performances from all involved, particularly Ineson and Joy, are convincing enough to transport viewers into their nightmarish world of Puritan filial hell. We see them try their hardest to make profit, but their best efforts are dogged when all their produce withers. Amidst this instability is the puberty problem of little Caleb, whose wandering eye leads him to quite literally eat the apple, his sexual repressions culminating in a disturbing exorcism and/or orgasm. Exacerbating the situation is a religious fundamentalism that is shaken by a sequence of ‘ungodly providence’. Oh, and of course, there’s the missing baby. Whilst the language, location, dress and beliefs in the film are markedly distinct from modern life, these family problems are certainly not exclusive to their seventeenth-century world.

The same can be said for the films treatment of gender. Accusations of witchcraft in the early-modern period and beyond were overwhelmingly directed toward women. More often than not, the witch in question would be over 40. Having lived their lives caring for their husband and other dependents, these women were unlikely to reproduce. In her Witchcraze, Lyndal Roper argued the concept of a witch ‘assaulted the very possibility of life’. Many of the stories that circulated in village communities would involve witches slaughtering animals, destroying crops and committing infanticidef. This reflects a cultural and political mind set in which woman was synonymous with fertility, the witch figure embodying the anti-mother archetype – supposedly attacking fertility itself.

Images and symbolism of fertility and motherhood are everywhere in The Witch, from the blood squirting from the goats udder to the dead baby chick in the hatched egg. Whilst Thomasin is on the brink of womanhood, the likelihood of her bearing children is hindered when she expresses unwillingness to live with another family in a different village (a woman marrying and reproducing was dependent upon her integrating with other families). Thomasin’s ultimate rejection of society’s definition of womanhood is confirmed in the visceral closing scenes where collective female liberation trumps the social and cultural norm. We suddenly see the film in a different light, one that negotiates female power and implicitly explores feminism. As Eggers himself admits, in The Witch, ‘feminism rises to the top’.

The Witch has already gathered a lot of buzz from critics and audience alike, and it’s not hard to see why. Eggers has marked himself as the front-runner of an up and coming league of arthouse horror heroes. He does this whilst encouraging us to question aspects of modern life, like the role of family and woman. I’m sure the horror world will eagerly await his next artistic venture.