With the current political pressures being exerted on news media in the US, cinematic comfort-blanket Steven Spielberg seems super-delighted to have emerged with such a timely film. In interviews, he’s pitched The Post as a rallying cry for the embattled news media of today; the posters shouting STREEP and HANKS like they are totemic warriors […]
Glass Mountain at Jimmy’s, reviewed by Tessa Harris
Glass Mountain, at Jimmy’s, February 11th, Manchester Sunday night at Jimmy’s was unmistakably northern. Classy acts with interesting sounds, all four bands were worth braving the sleet for. Headliners Glass Mountain (Bradford they told us) were preceded by Shallow Waters from Wigan, Violet Contours from York, and Dakota Avenue from Salford. While Jimmy’s wasn’t packed, […]
#Me Too Anthology, edited by Deborah Alma, reviewed by Ken Evans
#MeToo Anthology: A Women’s Poetry Anthology, editor Deborah Alma, (Fairacre Press). In Bernard MacLaverty’s novel, Midwinter Break, the author describes a tour bus ride to Buchenwald concentration camp. A wasp buzzes down the hot bus with shut windows. None of the tourists – pensive, afraid even – dare raise a hand to swat it, sensitised […]
Darkest Hour, dir. Joe Wright, reviewed by David Hartley
Joe Wright’s biopic of Winston Churchill comes along at a sticky moment for this troubled isle as we slip slowly but assuredly towards the uncertain shadows of our post-Brexit landscape. Our national identity, such as it is, feels thrillingly buoyant for some, and never more soulless or hollow for many others. So, how might our […]
Robert Desnos, Surrealist, Lover, Resistant, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Robert Desnos, Surrealist, Lover, Resistant, translated and introduced by Timothy Adѐs (Arc Publications, 2018) £19.99 pbk Others will review this sumptuous volume in the light of a knowledge of Desnos’s poetry. I can only comment on how it strikes someone almost completely new to his writing. What you want from a translation will partly depend […]
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri dir. Martin McDonagh, reviewed by David Hartley
With the proclamation of its title and the weathered defiance of Frances McDormand’s thousand-yard stare, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a film which demands attention. And it has garnered it, both from the critics and the Academy, as it edges ahead as the Oscars’ frontrunner, and deservedly so, perhaps. It’s by no means an […]
Conor O’Callaghan, Live Streaming, reviewed by Joe Carrick-Varty
Conor O’Callaghan, Live Streaming (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2017) Live Streaming (2017), O’Callaghan’s fifth collection of poems comes off the back of a six-year poetic absence in which he published a novel, Nothing on Earth (2016). Moving away from the self-reflexively metaphorical poems in Fiction (2005) such as ‘Coventry’ and ‘Gloves’, this book is more […]
Andrew McCulloch, Gradual, reviewed by Ian Pople
Andrew McCulloch, Gradual, (Melos Press) £5.00 The centre piece, literally, of Andrew McCulloch’s new pamphlet, Gradual, is a translation of six ‘Holy Sonnets’ attributed to the French playwright, Jean Racine. In a lengthy note at the back of the pamphlet, McCulloch acknowledges the disputed attribution of the poems. The poems also have a somewhat obscure […]
Beatrice Garland, The Drum, reviewed by Ian Pople
Beatrice Garland, The Drum Templar Poetry £10.00 A key note in Beatrice Garland’s debut collection, The Invention of Fireworks, was the tension between stability and change. In that first book, Garland reconciles that tension technically by using an adroit combination of lyric and narrative, working between epiphany and process. Garland’s new book, The Drum, also […]
Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, reviewed by Ian Pople
Douglas Crase, The Astropastorals, (Pressed Wafer $10.00) Douglas Crase’s The Astropastorals is a slim pamphlet of the ten poems Crase has chosen to publish since he published The Revisionist in 1981. The Revisionist gained immediate praise; its dustjacket had puffs from John Ashbery and James Merrill. David Kalstone introduced a reading by Ashbery and Crase […]
Lachlan Mackinnon, Doves, reviewed by Maryam Hessavi
Lachlan Mackinnon, Doves (Faber, £14.99). Doves is Mackinnon’s fifth collection of poetry. Following on from his last collection Small Hours, shortlisted in 2010 for the Forward Prize for Poetry, his new work marks a departure from a previously more delicate style. Doves is more forthright. In its style it is concerned most noticeably with form […]
Adrian Buckner, Downshifting, reviewed by Ian Pople
Adrian Buckner, Downshifting (Five Leaves Publications, £9.99). The OED defines ‘downshifting’ as ‘The action of downshift; an instance of this; spec. (orig. U.S.), the practice of changing a financially rewarding but stressful career or lifestyle for one less pressured and highly paid, but more fulfilling.’ The title poem of Adrian Buckner’s third book of poems paints an idealistic […]
John Matthias, At Large: Essays, Memoirs, Interviews, reviewed by Ian Pople
John Matthias, At Large: Essays, Memoirs, Interviews (Shearsman, £16.95). John Matthias, Complayntes for Doctor Neuro & other poems (Shearsman, £9.95). John Matthias, Jean Dibble, and Robert Archambeau, Revolutions: a Collaboration (Dos Madres, $20.00). John Matthias’ At Large is a compendious and welcome collection of Matthias’ essays, memoir and interviews. Very welcome because Matthias is a […]
Samuel Lee, A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore, reviewed by Natasha Stallard
Samuel Lee, A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore (Math Paper Press, $16.00). What’s the difference between a supermarket in Singapore and New Haven, Connecticut? In Samuel Lee’s debut collection ‘A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore’, the Singaporean poet and Yale student wanders the aisles of his native city along with the organic stores […]
Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lord and Commons, reviewed by Chad Campbell
Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lord and Commons, (Faber & Faber, £12.99). Ishion Hutchinson’s second book, House of Lords and Commons, was published by FSG in America, and released here, in the U.K., by Faber & Faber in November. The book’s reputation precedes it: winner of a National Book Critic Circle Award and top of sever […]
Collabro, The Bridgewater Hall, reviewed by Simon Haworth
Collabro, with support from Phillipa Hanna & special guest Carly Paoli), The Bridgewater Hall, 30 November 2017. Collabro arrive at the Bridgewater Hall towards the end of their third long UK tour. Since wining Britain’s Got Talent in 2014 the group have toured internationally and released three highly successful albums (Stars (2014), Act Two (2015) […]
BBC Philharmonic at the Bridgewater Hal, reviewed by Simon Haworth
BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Ludovic Morlot; The Bridgewater Hall, 25 November 2017. The world premiere of Arlene Sierra’s Nature Symphony tonight offers the audience a rare opportunity to hear the composer’s work performed in the UK. Brought up in Miami and New York but now resident in London, Sierra has collaborated with Ludovic Morlot and […]
The Florida Project dir. Sean Baker, reviewed by David Hartley
The latest in an emerging genre of a kind of post-Obama American social realism, The Florida Project lands us smack bang in the sticky heat of a Floridan summer in the run-down outskirts of the Magic Kingdom. Disneyland is a looming presence kept mostly off screen, but gaudily implied by the structures of our Orlando […]
Ian Marriott, The Hollow Bone, reviewed by Ian Pople
Ian Marriott, The Hollow Bone (Cinnamon Press, £8.99). The blurb on Ian Marriott’s first book does a good job of summing up the contents, ‘Meditative, spare and precise…suffused with a vital, shamanic sensibility.’ Marriott’s poems are often very short, with short lines in the kind of free verse which is happy to have different line […]
Shanta Acharya, Imagine: New and Selected Poems, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Shanta Acharya, Imagine: New and Selected Poems (Harper Collins Publishers India, INR 399). Shanta Acharya was born and educated in India, where she completed an MA in English before writing a DPhil on Emerson at Oxford and becoming a visiting scholar at Harvard. She’s worked for the investment bankers Morgan Stanley in London. She’s written […]
Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow, reviewed by Ian Pople
Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow (Bloodaxe, £9.95). Frank Ormsby’s last book, Goat’s Milk, was a New and Selected giving a rich retrospective on a poet who was part of the flowering of poetry from Ulster that emerged in the shadows of The Troubles. That flowering gave us, firstly, Heaney, Longley and Mahon, and in […]
Metamorphosis, The Lowry, reviewed by Simon Haworth
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (Splendid Productions/Kerry Frampton), The Lowry, 16 November 2017. Nobody is sure whether the performance has started. The house lights are still on. There is generic light jazz muzak playing through the sound system at a tasteful volume. The three actors, if they are the actors, are waving and pointing at the […]
Jennifer Egan at the Manchester Central Library, reviewed by Henry Cockburn
Jennifer Egan, hosted by Katie Popperwell at the Manchester Central Library. It starts out like any other highbrow reading. Lights down low, jazz, a room full of chattering literati (some of them refusing to take off their fedoras). Then Egan and Popperwell walk out and…silence. We’re meant to be clapping right? The audience are looking […]
Sir András Schiff at the Bridgewater Hall, reviewed by Simon Haworth
Sir András Schiff, The Bridgewater Hall (International Concert Series), 13 November 2017. As one of the leading interpreters of Bach’s (amongst many other composers’) keyboard works, Sir András Schiff needs little to no introduction. His is a career littered with awards, recognition, residencies, influential recordings and impressive performances throughout the world. Playing in Manchester as […]
The Hallé at the Bridgewater Hall, reviewed by Simon Haworth
The Hallé at the Bridgewater Hall, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth; 9 November 2017. Tonight’s concert, with the all-purpose Ryan Wigglesworth at the helm as the Hallé’s Principal Guest Conductor, offers two works by Mozart, namely the Aria for Soprano, Piano and Orchestra ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te?…Non temer, amato bene’ (K. 505) and Symphony No […]
Jim Johnstone, The Chemical Life, reviewed by Chad Campbell
Jim Johnstone, The Chemical Life (Signal Editions, £11.45). P.T. Anderson took a break mid-2016 to direct the video for Radiohead’s track ‘Daydreaming’, which follows Thom Yorke through a series of doors – fridge to hotel, hotel to house, closet to laundromat, and up a snowy mountain slope to a fire-lit cave: each door a border, […]
Rachael Allen & Marie Jacotey, Nights of Poor Sleep, reviewed by Lucy Burns
Rachael Allen, Faber New Poets 9 (Faber and Faber, £5.00). Rachael Allen, Hypochondria (If a Leaf Falls Press, £5.00). Rachael Allen & Marie Jacotey, Nights of Poor Sleep (Test Centre, £15.00). Allen’s debut pamphlet with Faber New Poets in 2014 nostalgically reimagined a suburban adolescence “always expecting/ something to happen.” We traipse round the harbour, […]
Ange Mlinko, Distant Mandate, reviewed by Ian Pople
Ange Mlinko, Distant Mandate (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $23.00). Ange Mlinko’s previous book was called Marvellous Things Overheard, a quotation from Aristotle. ‘Distant Mandate’ is, according to the dust jacket of this new book, a quotation from the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai and is a quotation from Krasznahorkai’s essay on the Alhambra. In the previous […]
Uncle Vanya, HOME, reviewed by Laura Ryan
Uncle Vanya, by Andrew Upton, directed by Walter Meierjohann; November 8 2017. Walter Meierjohann’s production of Andrew Upton’s translation of Uncle Vanya forms part of HOME’s season of art, film and theatre inspired by the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution: A Revolution Betrayed. Anton Chekhov’s late play was in fact first written and performed […]
Daljit Nagra, British Museum, reviewed by Gurnaik Johal
Daljit Nagra, British Museum (Faber & Faber, £14.99). Daljit Nagra’s third book of original poetry, British Museum, has been called “a significant departure of style”. It is definitely more understated than his previous Forward Prize-winning Look We Have Coming to Dover! and the lavishly titled Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger-Toy Machine!!! Where those two collections […]
John Wedgwood Clarke, Landfill, reviewed by Ian Pople
John Wedgwood Clarke, Landfill (Valley Press, £10.99). John Wedgwood Clarke’s first full collection, Ghost Pot, came with encomia from Carol Rumens, Penelope Shuttle and Michael Symmons Roberts. On its cover, Bernard O’Donoghue called the book, ‘a masterpiece’. Over the years, his poems have appeared in a range of prestigious journals including, Poetry Ireland Review, PN […]
78/52, dir. Alexandre O’Phillipe, reviewed by David Hartley
There must be a palpable sense of trepidation when filmmakers and documentarians approach the topic of film itself, when the camera has to fetishize its mirror image in the form of a genius auteur or the upstart aesthetics of an eternally restless art form. Here, director Alexandre O’Phillipe reaches out like Indiana Jones for the […]
Ibibio Sound Machine, Gorilla, reviewed by Marli Roode
Ibibio Sound Machine, Gorilla; 28 October 2017. The cowbell is the happiest sound there is. The song that requires the now shirtless (but still in a hat) percussionist to whale on the cowbell could’ve been twice as long and I wouldn’t have cared. But there are a lot of happy sounds tonight. There’s the mbira, […]
Hedda Gabler, The Lowry, reviewed by Tristan Burke
Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Patrick Marber and directed by Ivo van Hove; The Lowry, 31 October 2017. Productions of Ibsen often recall the paintings of the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi. These mysterious paintings depict uncanny, bourgeois interiors, white panelled walls, isolated items of furniture that inhabit the paintings with the presence of […]
Manchester Literature Festival: Howard Jacobson at Central Library, reviewed by Henry Cockburn
Howard Jacobson at Central Library, hosted by Rachel Cooke; 7 October 2017. “Let’s take it as read—we all love Howard.” When you’re three audience ‘questions’ down and the host has to step in to stem the lovefest, it probably means a couple of things. The thinkers in the room have been given a few things […]