Moby: Then It Fell Apart, Faber & Faber: £14.99 Patti Smith: Year of the Monkey, Bloomsbury: £12.99 Moby and Patti Smith represent two distinct generations of American music. Moby is one of the leading creators of popular electronic dance music. His breakthrough album Play became the soundtrack for films, and many adverts. His videos have […]
Cork International Short Story Festival 2019 (25 – 28 September), reviewed by Phil Olsen
A Partial Diary of the Cork International Short Story Festival 2019 (25 – 28 September) Phil Olsen Like me, the Cork Arts Theatre was established in 1976 (though I was never fondly referred to as the “CAT Club” in my early years). It is here that I arrived on a rainy late September evening to […]
MLF 2019: Elif Shafak at Central Library, 10/10/19, reviewed by Probert Dean
When Elif Shafak finished her talk, I looked back on the event – an intimate gathering at Manchester Central Library – and reflected on her aesthetic turns of phrase, the lingering visions of her lively prose, and the sobering inevitability with which all discussions now turn to politics. Shafak is described as British-Turkish (or Turkish-British) […]
MLF 2019: ‘A Little Body Are Many Parts / Un Cuerpecito Son Muchas Partes’, 9/10/19, reviewed by Charlotte Wetton
‘A Little Body Are Many Parts / Un Cuerpecito Son Muchas Partes’ is one of those rare and lovely things: a poetry book with the original language and the English translation side by side. Poems from Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’ eight collections, written in Spanish, sit beside Abigail Parry and Seraphina Vick’s English translations. During the […]
MLF 2019: Isabel Galleymore and Stephen Sexton, Blackwell’s, 7/10/19, reviewed by Kathryn Tann
Introduced to Blackwells on a chilly October evening are poets Isabel Galleymore and Stephen Sexton, along with their shining debut collections. Both with previously published pamphlets, both lecturers in Creative Writing, yet both with a unique and distinctive voice; each takes their place before the keen audience to read and discuss their latest work. First […]
MLF 2019: Take 2, Jonathan Safran Foer at the Cosmo Rodewald, 8/10/19, reviewed by Erin McNamara
Jonathan Safran Foer has a plan to tackle climate change – but he wants you to come up with your own. In conversation with Erica Wagner, former literary editor of The Times, the writer discussed his latest book – a non-fiction work on climate change that is not so much a call to arms as […]
MLF 2019: Take 1, Jonathan Safran Foer at the Cosmo Rodewald, 8/10/19, reviewed by Joss Areté Kelvin
Jonathan Safran Foer, Literature Live at the Martin Harris Centre, Centre for New Writing, 8/10/19, reviewed by Joss Areté Kelvin Acclaimed novelist and non-fiction writer Jonathan Safran Foer is sharing his own vulnerabilities in an effort to get his audience to question our own. His new book, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Starts […]
MLF 2019: Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein, RNCM Theatre, 5/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Hase
Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: Manchester Literature Festival at the RNCM Theatre in partnership with the Centre for New Writing, 5/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Hase On the evening of Saturday the 5th of October Jeanette Winterson gave a reading unlike any other. Interactive, dramatic, futuristic, her performance was electrifying. Winterson animated the audience with her insightful and […]
Marilyn Hacker | Blazons: New and Selected Poems | reviewed by Ian Pople
Marilyn Hacker | Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000 – 2018 | Carcanet: £14.99 There is a detailed, but never dry, attention paid in the poems in Marilyn Hacker’s new, Selected; an attention is not only to the things she observes, but, and this is a huge part of Hacker’s success, there is a real […]
MLF 2019: Common People at The Cosmo Rodewald Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, 5/10/19 reviewed by Charlotte Wetton
Review of Common People, Manchester Literature I went to the ‘Common People’ event because I crave new stories and new voices. Working-class experience in literature is a rich seam not yet tapped. If I were a publisher, I would be signing up some of these debut writers pronto. Common People is an anthology of memoir – […]
MLF 2019: David Nicholls in conversation with Alex Clark, at the Cosmo Rodewald Hall, Martin Harris Centre, 4/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Way
David Nicholls in conversation with Alex Clark The last time journalist Alex Clark interviewed writer David Nicholls in Manchester, it was, she says, a “mad experience” involving the police and broken microphones. David returned to Manchester on 4th October 2019 as part of his book tour for Sweet Sorrow – a story of first love […]
Paul Muldoon and Alice Oswald: Literature Live at The Martin Harris Centre, Centre for New Writing, 3/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Hase
Paul Muldoon and Alice Oswald: Literature Live at The Martin Harris Centre, Centre for New Writing, 3/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Hase An evening in time, out of time, about time. Last night the remarkable Alice Oswald and Paul Muldoon gave the Centre of New Writing an evening of laughter and reflection. Both poets chose from […]
Macbeth, Royal Exchange 13 Sept – 19 Oct, reviewed by Ronan Long
Macbeth | The Royal Exchange Macbeth has, at this point, been reshaped and diverted in so many different ways, it seems impossible for a director to find something new and explorable in its enduring characters and story. In directing this modernized incarnation, Christopher Haydon definitely gives it a good shot. The play opens with a […]
HarmonieBand | Berlin: Symphony of a Great City | reviewed by David Adamson
HarmonieBand presents Berlin: Symphony of a Great City | HOME, Manchester 1982 European Cup winners Aston Villa have a song that goes, “Aston Villa FC / We’re by far the greatest team the world has ever seen”. Now, I’m all for the occasional self-congratulation, but history – and that slippery adjective – have a way […]
Rebecca Tamás | WITCH | reviewed by Rebecca Hurst
Rebecca Tamás | WITCH | Penned in the Margins £9.99 Rebecca Tamás’ WITCH answered a question I didn’t know I was asking. Before reading WITCH I heard the electric crackle of its imminence: from the social media marketing campaign and Poetry Book Society recommendation, to the sold-out pre-publication performance in Manchester into which I failed […]
A Taste of Honey | The Lowry | reviewed by Peter Wild
A Taste of Honey | The Lowry | Saturday 21st September Subdued is the word. We’re looking at a noirish basement. An underground nightclub, perhaps. A jazz trio – airbrushed drums, double bass, piano – serenade us. A brassy looking blonde starts to belt out a song as people move about the stage, draping her […]
Patricia Smith | Incendiary Art | reviewed by Ian Pople
Patricia Smith | Incendiary Art | Bloodaxe Books: £12 …and indeed it is. There is, perhaps, little surprise about the contents of much of this immensely powerful book. Given the events that are reported, and, as Smith would undoubtedly say, not reported, on our screens each day, Smith has a harrowing if ready stream of […]
Sunset Boulevard reviewed by David Adamson
Sunset Boulevard | HOME | Manchester Now, it is 2019, and Hollywood is a humourless place. Caught between wanting to appear serious about contemporary issues while not taking itself too seriously, it finds itself lurching between a politician’s earnest, pained brow and that fevered, rictus grin that Cherie Blair used to wear in public engagements. […]
Pharricide (Confingo) by Vincent De Swarte, translated by Nicholas Royle. Reviewed by Richard Clegg
Pharricide (Confingo) by Vincent De Swarte, translated by Nicholas Royle. This short novel is a terrific read. It is always good to find a new author and I must admit this was all new to me. Vincent de Swarte wrote several books for children and five for adults. “Pharricide,” published in 1998, won the Prix […]
Three Pamphlets | reviewed by Ian Pople
Martina Evans, Michèle Roberts, Denise Saul, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch | Speaking Again: Poems for International Women’s Day | Rack Press: £5 Even though each poet in Speaking Again: Poems for International Women’s Day has a slim selection, four quite individual voices are present in this Rack Press pamphlet for International Women’s day. The importance of those […]
Imarhan | Night & Day Cafe | reviewed by David Adamson
Imarhan | Night & Day Cafe | Manchester: August 6th The Night & Day café looks like a cross between Cheers and the red-lit and threatening open-mic nights from every country music biopic. Throughout the decade I’ve been coming in here, it’s never changed. A while back it obviously made a series of personal and […]
Karen Russell | Orange World | reviewed by Livi Michael
Karen Russell | Orange World | Penguin Random House: £14.99 There are readers who feel a certain prejudice against special effects. Who might read Beloved for instance, as a historical novel, and be more moved by the story of Sethe, and the atrocities of slavery, than the device of the dead infant who is brought […]
Rebecca Goss | Girl | reviewed by Eleanor Ward
Rebecca Goss | Girl | Carcanet Press: £9.99 “I spent the day being Rachel” is what Rebecca Goss tells us a few poems into her third collection Girl. It is one example of the many identities of “girls” we are to meet over the collection, and the many understandings of her own identity in the […]
Keith Hutson | Baldwin’s Catholic Geese | reviewed by Ian Pople
Keith Hutson | Baldwin’s Catholic Geese | Bloodaxe Books: £12 A book of mainly sonnets about, mostly long dead, music hall performers may not sound very entertaining… or, actually, it does, and is. But the point of the book is not only the recalling and regaling of lives which the vast majority of us are […]
Love Supreme Jazz Festival, reviewed by Ian Pople
Love Supreme Jazz Festival 2019 | Glynde Place | July 5th to 7th On record, Manchester’s own Go Go Penguin can seem occasionally samey, even cloying. The punched, ‘epic’ chords that pianist Chris Illingworth’s right hand deploys can feel a little coercive, the rhythmic push a little determined. Live, however, they prove the point. The […]
Sally Wen Mao | Oculus | reviewed by Ian Pople
Sally Wen Mao | Oculus | Graywolf Press: $16.00 There’s a driven intensity to many of the poems Sally Wen Mao’s new volume. And this intensity is true even as she moves through a range of figures from popular culture from Anna May Wong to Janelle Monáe and Solange. In particular, Anna May Wong, who […]
Nina Bogin | Thousandfold | reviewed by Ian Pople
Nina Bogin | Thousandfold | Carcanet: £9.99 There is a lot of snow towards the start of Thousandfold, Nina Bogin’s fourth collection. And even when there isn’t snow, there’s snow, as in the beginning of ‘The Dream’ part 1, of Bogin’s sequence, ‘Visit to a Friend’, ‘I take a snow shovel, a laundry rack and […]
Beverley Bie Brahic | The Hotel Eden | reviewed by Maryam Hessavi
Beverley Bie Brahic | The Hotel Eden | Carcanet: £9.99 And I carve out the bruises, the fine-bore Tunnels of worms. I slice the fruit thinly, until the white flesh Is almost translucent, I arrange the slices in the new pot from Ikea (I burned the old one), Add a trickle of water And […]
Jenny Xie | Eye Level | reviewed by Ian Pople
Jenny Xie | Eye Level | Graywolf Press: $16.00 The blurbs on the back of Jenny Xie’s debut volume, Eye Level, include the New York Review of Books, Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker, Tracy K Smith and Brenda Shaughnessy. This first book has clearly hit the sweet spot as far as the reviewers are […]
Howard Jones | Bridgewater Hall | May 30th
Howard Jones | Bridgewater Hall | May 30th Thursday night at Bridgewater hall saw synth-pop star Howard Jones return to Manchester in support of his new album Transform and to mark the 35th anniversary of his double-platinum debut 1984 album Human Lib. Jones, no stranger to Manchester, studied piano at the Royal Northern College of […]
Forrest Gander | Be With | reviewed by Ian Pople
Forrest Gander | Be With | New Directions: $16.95 On the back of Forrest Gander’s new collection, the Washington Post is quoted with the comment, ‘A complex reading experience punctuated by intense beauty.’ It clearly takes a certain level of honesty to place such an ambivalent comment as part of a blurb. But there is […]
Ken Smith | Collected Poems | reviewed by Ian Pople
Ken Smith | Collected Poems | Bloodaxe Books £14.99 The slight sense of a jostling masculinity in Ken Smith’s poetry might be part of the reason that it is often described as ‘muscular’. In part, this jostling feels as though it rises from the abundant contradictions of his life and manifested in the poetry; that […]
Great Painters Are Rare: William Stott of Oldham,1857-1900, an exhibition at Oldham Art Gallery until May 11th, reviewed by Richard Clegg
Great Painters Are Rare: William Stott of Oldham,1857-1900, an exhibition at Oldham Art Gallery until May 11th Reviewed by Richard Clegg William Stott led two lives, one rooted in Oldham and its environs, the other outside Paris in a centre for modern painters at Grez-sur-Loing where he made his home. The son of a mill […]
John Koethe | Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016 | reviewed by Ian Pople
John Koethe | Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016 | FSG: $40.00 In a characteristically pellucid essay, ‘The Pyrrhic Measure in American Poetry’, John Koethe’s friend and fellow poet, Douglas Crase, sets out to analyse a particular characteristic of the American poetic voice. Crase links the vistas of the American landscape with a particular type of American […]