After a long, pandemic-induced hiatus, we are very glad to bring you this new issue of The Manchester Review. If the pandemic brought us to a standstill, the machinery of editing and preparing a new issue has suffered from the new pressures of 2022, as additional tasks and work piled in to the week-by-week maintenance […]
Current Issue Subscribe
Categories:
Editorial
After a long, pandemic-induced hiatus, we are very glad to bring you this new issue of The Manchester Review. If the pandemic brought us to a standstill, the machinery of editing and preparing a new issue has suffered from the new pressures of 2022, as additional tasks and work piled in to the week-by-week maintenance […]
3 Poems
Kenneth Koch Kenneth Koch for God’s sake, Kenneth Koch reading to twenty people in a room above a pub. And not even poems, short plays. Crazy. Next day he wheeled a suitcase into Huddersfield buffet, three tennis racquets strapped to it across the Atlantic, to meet for breakfast on his way to York York. […]
3 Poems
April April is too beautiful. The edible yellows of daffodils sicken – egg yolk and saffron – lesser celandine like butter rancid amidst the leaves’ plastics. Cowslips put out hurt face after hurt face. Tulips are drastic, dropping pink bruised hearts in the grass. The world is ending in slow petalled explosions. The sky deepens […]
Gas
Gas The Friday he has your money by doesn’t come. ‘The reports are the reports,’ he says, not answering the phone. He’s a match and every room he enters has been filling steadily with gas. The anniversary passes like a kidney stone which gives him another good idea. The best he’s had for a while. […]
2 Poems
The Following Days The following day there was nowhere to go. Not a café in which to roll your chair up to a window, not a seat in the lounge to watch you read the paper, not a supermarket to let you buy cakes you didn’t eat. The following day there was nothing to […]
3 Poems
The sun falls down To lift the sun from where she’s fallen in the stream would take two of us, and a cart in which to heave her wheeling her back to where the sky begins to let her have another turn. She would be winking, ungainly, broad-backed in the barrow, all mild and ribald. […]
3 Poems
Fitting the Picture A thousand pieces. I start at the edge, add lintel to jamb, make space to press odd shapes into what’s missing. Two bikes, one blue, one red, rest on a bridge over a canal at sunset in a city I’ve been to once or twice. Front wheels confer, Venn-style, maybe sharing notes […]
3 Poems
Swallows Traffic of swallows over cow dung in May’s yard. The low, dark arrows turned up every summer To a nest in the timbers of the byre Where they gossiped high in gossamer. There was a gap at the door where they got in, Which I blocked against their orbiting. Then I swung an empty […]
2 Poems
retablo for an unwelcome advance my legs are paper my hair has flown from my head I’m a frog thrust into boiling water a flamingo-pink motel bursting into the room my army helmet is a salad bowl I […]
3 Poems
Remote A man is prodding something on a grill using a long pair of tongs. A boy is holding a blue book whose cover has the words Heroes of Olympus in yellow. There’s a woman too and she is holding a glass. ‘I like the idea of a cool red’ she says to no […]
2 Poems
To Add Value If only the shtick weren’t so hackneyed, but I go on. As you perhaps already know, I say, one day, rather than doctor, cloud consultant, equity fundamentals data analyst, immunoassay prober, systems mogul, all the dream jobs, everyone realises the only thing worth being is poet. Probably you won’t realise this until […]
2 Poems
Summer Sunk beneath the hot midday, the bay affirms its integrity – some sense of filigreed coherence held fast against the tide. The sky’s unreachable view shifts light from nowheres into orchid and celandine, as form shows itself pristine yet mute to its own meaning. A collie’s sea-shook rainbow sheds inertia onto sand and […]
Cocoa l’Orange
Cocoa l’Orange Like a crouching battalion, the thirty houses in Heatherbell Way nestle along the incline of the mountain. The McEntee’s long landing window is positioned directly opposite the window of the Kearney’s master bedroom, slightly to the left of its en-suite bathroom. Since the first lockdown, Jake Kearney has spent more time […]
Fallen Stock
Fallen stock Tony’s out of the door and jogging across the yard before the trailer’s through the gate, a sheepdog worrying his ankles. A moment later his face is at Ed’s window, a tired moon in the dawn light. They’re up on the top fields. Do you need a hand getting out of the […]
My Husband’s Doing Soup
My Husband’s Doing Soup A cyclist shot by, passing so close to Elizabeth that she felt his Lycra-covered arm brush against hers. She stumbled to the side, almost tripping over her own feet. He didn’t even glance her way. He disappeared into the fog, the steady rattle of his wheels on the metal […]
An Unravelling
An Unravelling Julie turned the corner into her street with a touch of grumpiness about her. It was raining steadily, though it hadn’t been when she left her house half an hour before, which was why she had decided against a coat. Now she was wet, the rain having made short shrift of her […]