The last thing many of us want to do right now is spend even more time looking at a screen, but our reading of new work for this issue of The Manchester Review reminded us again and again that poems, essays and fiction can transport you or suddenly refract your immediate environs into a charged […]
Poetry
2 Poems
Late Blight The field had spent years drinking rain and pills. Received infusions, dialysis, pesticide repair. Creeslough breathed again! Its scarred mouth opening, sleep-heavy. The field is threaded through for the new harvest, overwintered. The lambs, cloud-woollen, bounce over orange soil to find a new water, frost-hardy. Some were quick-footed. Some came back later, others […]
3 Poems
All Blue Things I was once a chicken heart; small, singing down the river I was once a standing bear; twi -light claws; rainbow salmon scales I was once an aging man; sat, watching them deliver Our whole universe; dark, backed into the soil And one time when an old skin had rotted blue on […]
2 Poems
Disillusionment rain glints on the copper beech standard cirrus motionless above that will do – the poem has been here or hereabouts many times and what does it do with its words? where does it take us to? are these rain glints the very ones I think I saw? disillusionment can fall […]
2 Poems
Glasgow Nights The city falls in bursts of light around me. I am falling too. Life in the shape of cars float across the Kingston Bridge. Inside each car, the drivers daydream. Hand on wheel, foot on pedal, driving into the sky; faces calm as mannequins. The bridge simply carries them. She is obedient and […]
The Castleford Sutra
The Castleford Sutra “is it not delightful to have a friend come from afar?” Confucius I. Descent My Lord the Bodhisattva Mahasattva looks down as the obese and diabetic roll along Methley Place on mobility scooters, considers descent, whose aid, if any, he might enlist, his own fallibility. Dawn but no sunrise. Chris Stanton […]
Three Ethiopian Contemporary Women Poets
Three contemporary Ethiopian women poets from the first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry, Songs We Learn from Trees, just published by Carcanet Press KEBEDECH TEKLEAB Cotton-life This era of exile winds its spindle of raw cotton before the seed is removed and life bursts out, before the cotton is combed, before it is roved and […]
2 Poems
Outtakes The world occurs to me. I feel my way into the space and cooling air outside, leaving behind an article about the bridge collapse in Genoa, a city I once visited, the sun, now (relatively speaking) level with the upstairs windows, setting, slumping down and to the right, which seems completely insignificant. I destroy […]
2 Poems
Cut the lovely fairies in Sister’s room have blades on their backs and lately Lee sucks lemons for their sharps looks for wounds in snow on his morning walk with Mam fantasizes he is sliced like a pear but today the blood smells real he wipes his hands on his trackies dizzy tries to walk […]
3 Poems
Change It felt a bit like approaching the king in the counting house we had sung about, the frown amidst the glowers of gold-tipped smoke at the hesitant Ten 2ps please, said again as the music fizzed and throbbed and the lights thrilled in their circuits. After the glance down at the tendered coin, judged […]
2 Poems
Omnivore It was prior to the silent parts of your body becoming noticeable you were regenerating heat and skin as one bird lifted on the Lower Zab river, […]
A Merlin in the Sheeffrys
A Merlin in the Sheeffrys There is a feeling that is equal to the land, a sense of self that is the journey’s length. It changes, bright to dark, and back again, in moments such as when a hill decides to vanish, prompting the sea to appear, sun-thatched, sun-pregnant, sun-remonstrating, before another bog-dividing mile […]
Field Studies
When, after the guns, the gas, the bodies and the blood, they ask the earth, the earth says it doesn’t understand. The earth has trouble speaking, coughs and chokes. When they return later, the earth refuses to answer anything. They look for birds but the birds are gone. They wait for squirrels, they watch […]
3 C.P. Cavafy Translations
The Bandage He said that he’d stumbled into a wall or fallen. But likely the cut on his shoulder was caused by something more serious. He stood up abruptly, reaching for some photographs on a high shelf that he wanted to hold. The bandage loosened and the cut opened. I dressed his shoulder again, but […]
2 Poems
Matchbox Today I meet her for the first time: a brunette, unlike my mother. She shows me Father’s wallet photos of him dressed as a pirate lets me smell his coat hanging in the hall. She clasps a small black bundle to her heart then hands it to me, a crumpled plastic bag […]
2 Poems
Cello Case After her cello was sold, her bows all given away, little remained of my Mother except for her cello case— That large brown case was almost the shape of a person, though it was only a shell, hard, expressionless, and always a little forbidding sitting in our living room. It was the thing […]
Messages
Messages back under the mountain nourish myself / hunter-gatherer she’ll be coming round Mont-Royal when she comes […]