After the storm that’s my mum— screaming at me, at the nurses, telling us she’ll batter us, using words I didn’t know she knew, all’s calm. Mary, in the next bed turns the pages of yesterday’s newspaper, cuts a banana with a plastic spoon, feeds each piece into her custard. Betty, opposite, sucks a bread […]
Hare
What if the dangerous thing actually happens and you are elsewhere, looking away – at a hare on the grass in the compound of the offices, twirling the phone cord and listening, bored, to an adviser advise you on what’s wrong with the mortgage application that shouldn’t be wrong because you should know that the […]
Two poems
I Rank All the Beautiful Things There Are I rank all the beautiful things there are starting with self-sacrifice, then supernovas, the brain, love, virga, Korean pottery, lemurs, cuckoo clocks, suits of armour for horses, a child’s first words, mercy, bread, and so on. The list extends for miles in knee-high piles of pages I […]
Two poems
Warming Time was, they would air lift food supplies to hill farms trenched in snow for months. We’ve not seen that here for twenty years. Christmas is warm and wet, viruses spoiling through the closed-in valleys like gossip. February, no doubt, will be the same slide into March, weeks of white-lid skies, least path a […]
Eight poems
Maximin When Maximin shouts at the Emperor Severus, almost in a breath, Look at me, look what I can do, he is gigantic, his body is taut but has no purpose than to flex and recover. Severus is content. It is his son Geta’s birthday. Look at me, Maximin shouts, look what I can do. […]
Three poems
I Have To Confess That Only Sometimes Am I With You after Michael Earl Craig It occurs to me I am like a houseplant. I turn a little in my chair to look out a different window. A rabbit has stepped out from behind a shrub; the rabbit presents himself to me. They say poetry […]
Arctic Circle
My father’s brain filleted on the icy X-ray block glows luminescent, a strange fish on a slab. I shiver at this part of him I never thought I’d see. Instead his neural pathways presented in a grin we shared on Sundays by the sea, watching birds scatter air when he clapped his hands. The surgeon […]
The Drawing Room
Betty looks into the tea leaves. She’s wearing thick woolen purple tights with a tweed skirt. Pip and Bobo, her Yorkshire Terriers sit at her feet. We’re on the low sofas beside the fireplace. ‘What can you see?’, I ask her, but the leaves aren’t clear. There’s a gilt mirror to our left that looks […]
God-culture: an interview with Robert Bringhurst
Robert Bringhurst was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1946, and raised in western North America, moving back and forth across the US/Canada border. He moved to Vancouver in 1972 as a graduate student at the University of British Columbia and has lived on the B.C. coast ever since. He is the author of fourteen […]
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 […]
Little Dragon, Manchester Academy, reviewed by Chad Campbell
Little Dragon; Manchester Academy, 26 October 2017. What do Bloc Party, Tv On the Radio, U2, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Queens of the Stone Age, share in common with Little Dragon? They all tried to make danceable records. Some decent. Some terrible. But none of them good. Little Dragon has been perfecting their indie/electronic/R&B […]
BBC Philharmonic at the Bridgewater Hall, reviewed by Simon Haworth
BBC Philharmonic, conducted Nicholas Collon; The Bridgewater Hall, 21 October 2017. For their latest outing at the Bridgewater Hall the BBC Philharmonic offer up a diverse and intriguing program that allows different sections of the orchestra to shine before they come back together in full force for a glorious and powerful performance of probably the […]
Manchester Literature Festival: Kamila Shamsie with Jeanette Winterson, reviewed by Namra Amir
Kamila Shamsie with Jeanette Winterson; Martin Harris Centre, 17 October 2017. People tell you never meet your idols, for fear they don’t live up to your expectations. In my case, watching Kamila Shamsie in conversation with Jeannette Winterson lived up to the admiration I hold for the author. The evening began with John McAuliffe, Co-Director […]
Caroline Bird, In These Days of Prohibition, reviewed by Annie Muir
Caroline Bird, In These Days of Prohibition (Carcanet, £9.99). In These Days of Prohibition, Caroline Bird’s fifth collection with Carcanet, is full of poems that are almost always surreal, often funny, and sometimes profoundly shocking. The book has three sections, each with its own epigraph. It begins with a quote from John Ashbery: ‘Suppose this […]
Manchester Literature Festival: Zaffar Kunial, The Whitworth, reviewed by Chad Campbell
Zaffar Kunial, introduced by Andrew McMillan, The Whitworth, 19 October 2017. Poet Zaffar Kunial and painter Raqib Shaw share some common ground. Both have roots in Kashmir (Kunial through his father; Shaw by birth) and England (Kunial by birth; Shaw by virtue of having lived and worked here for over 20 years). But that is […]