Two or three thin, reedy notes are looped through the Lyric Theatre’s sound system prior to the evening’s performance of the Donmar’s King Lear, they alternate, sometimes create intervals with each other like strange, invisible wind chimes. Audience members are expectant but seem perturbed, no doubt the desired effect of this pre-performance touch. Two middle-aged […]
Archive | March, 2011
Two Collections from Don Coles
Don Coles, A Dropped Glove in Regent Street (Signal) Don Coles Where We Might Have Been (Signal) Born in 1927, Don Coles began publishing poems in 1975 and over the past 35 years has produced ten books which possess a distinctive tone, both casual and observant, while fiercely arranging and sequencing those seeming casual observations […]
Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability (Faber and Faber) £9.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Of Mutability is a book about death and change. Some of its poems hauntingly evoke unease, fear and loss. What is astonishing is how often the same poems, looked at from another angle, twinkle with humour, playfulness and resilient vitality. “Procedure”, the penultimate piece, is one of the most poignantly life-affirming poems I know. Here, […]
Cat’s Eyes, St. Philip’s Church Salford, 14 March 2011
When I booked to see Faris Badwan’s Cat’s Eyes play the beautiful St. Phil’s in Salford I admit I was hoping for spectacle. The Horrors’ frontman and his skinny jeans, playing with a classically-trained multi-instrumentalist, in one of the city’s oldest churches, with his big hair – it’d take someone much less gothically-inclined than me […]