I Am There was a time he could fix anything – opening the Telegraph on his iPad – on a tractor himself – scraping his mother’s jam on his toast – everything was done by hand – the printing press is dead – with a gripe, and they’d pile the shit up on the midden […]
Under the Bridges
Under the Bridges 1. I’m growing under bridges. Looking up at bridges, looking through one bridge to the next. Different shapes making different shapes. Trying to name all the shapes but having to make up names for new shapes. Octohedragon, climbadecadon, redrangle. The bridges don’t look like they move, but they do. Cars and trucks […]
Two Poems
Desire …Now women are at their foulest, / But men are weak since they are parched in the head and knees / By Sirius… Alcaeus Outside is that summer which we longed for on winter nights from underneath our layers of eiderdown, remembering the sudden dawns and sultry weather, the freedom of bare legs, the […]
Excerpt from Forgotten Work
Excerpt from Forgotten Work Like all young bands, they bandied names about All evening. Lou, the lead guitar, liked “Lout,” A word that clubbed you like a cord of wood. It’s dumb, said Lou, but arty dumb, like blood- Smeared dolls deployed as drumsticks—Henry Rollins Does Dada. Jim, on keys, preferred “The Dolphins,” After […]
Three Poems
Home Like a wary traveller suddenly at the door, she’d ask about the corncrake and if I ever heard its call. It was, I used to think, a simple question – nothing cosmic, deep or existential – she was, I just assumed, adjusting to the time to which she had returned. To tell the truth, […]
Three Poems
Rehearsal They look like they could be going somewhere. The bass player’s bringing everything he owns. The cellos and bass park closest to the door. There’s a list of their names, a place for coats. I can’t help thinking of toothbrushes, soap, honey wrapped for the journey in clothes, the instruments left at home […]
Two Poems
Louise Tonight you have set out all the keys on the oak table. They lie on the grained and pitted surface, each with its own design, finials of love-knots, triquetras, plain oval loops. You align them carefully, crosswise to the grain, you lay them out as you would lay out the cards for a reading, […]
Blue
Blue Months on it recurs in disparate forms, the famous blue of those ubiquitous chairs in orderly rows, sun loungers and parasols, striped blue on bone white sand, the graduated blue of the middle of August reflected in the tinted lenses of new sunglasses bought to replace a pair left at home. Certain tiles – […]
Pharricide (Confingo) by Vincent De Swarte, translated by Nicholas Royle. Reviewed by Richard Clegg
Pharricide (Confingo) by Vincent De Swarte, translated by Nicholas Royle. This short novel is a terrific read. It is always good to find a new author and I must admit this was all new to me. Vincent de Swarte wrote several books for children and five for adults. “Pharricide,” published in 1998, won the Prix […]
Three Poems by Xi Chuan, translated by Lucas Klein
Eight Fragments 1. Which Pornographic Peach Blossom Which pornographic peach blossom dreamt of me biting into this juicy peach and thought up this question in the orchard of the Queen of the West? I, the Monkey King, stole in here—and now I must steal out. 2. Facing the Sea Facing the sea, back toward […]
Three Pamphlets | reviewed by Ian Pople
Martina Evans, Michèle Roberts, Denise Saul, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch | Speaking Again: Poems for International Women’s Day | Rack Press: £5 Even though each poet in Speaking Again: Poems for International Women’s Day has a slim selection, four quite individual voices are present in this Rack Press pamphlet for International Women’s day. The importance of those […]
Imarhan | Night & Day Cafe | reviewed by David Adamson
Imarhan | Night & Day Cafe | Manchester: August 6th The Night & Day café looks like a cross between Cheers and the red-lit and threatening open-mic nights from every country music biopic. Throughout the decade I’ve been coming in here, it’s never changed. A while back it obviously made a series of personal and […]
Karen Russell | Orange World | reviewed by Livi Michael
Karen Russell | Orange World | Penguin Random House: £14.99 There are readers who feel a certain prejudice against special effects. Who might read Beloved for instance, as a historical novel, and be more moved by the story of Sethe, and the atrocities of slavery, than the device of the dead infant who is brought […]
Rebecca Goss | Girl | reviewed by Eleanor Ward
Rebecca Goss | Girl | Carcanet Press: £9.99 “I spent the day being Rachel” is what Rebecca Goss tells us a few poems into her third collection Girl. It is one example of the many identities of “girls” we are to meet over the collection, and the many understandings of her own identity in the […]
Keith Hutson | Baldwin’s Catholic Geese | reviewed by Ian Pople
Keith Hutson | Baldwin’s Catholic Geese | Bloodaxe Books: £12 A book of mainly sonnets about, mostly long dead, music hall performers may not sound very entertaining… or, actually, it does, and is. But the point of the book is not only the recalling and regaling of lives which the vast majority of us are […]
Love Supreme Jazz Festival, reviewed by Ian Pople
Love Supreme Jazz Festival 2019 | Glynde Place | July 5th to 7th On record, Manchester’s own Go Go Penguin can seem occasionally samey, even cloying. The punched, ‘epic’ chords that pianist Chris Illingworth’s right hand deploys can feel a little coercive, the rhythmic push a little determined. Live, however, they prove the point. The […]
Sally Wen Mao | Oculus | reviewed by Ian Pople
Sally Wen Mao | Oculus | Graywolf Press: $16.00 There’s a driven intensity to many of the poems Sally Wen Mao’s new volume. And this intensity is true even as she moves through a range of figures from popular culture from Anna May Wong to Janelle Monáe and Solange. In particular, Anna May Wong, who […]
Nina Bogin | Thousandfold | reviewed by Ian Pople
Nina Bogin | Thousandfold | Carcanet: £9.99 There is a lot of snow towards the start of Thousandfold, Nina Bogin’s fourth collection. And even when there isn’t snow, there’s snow, as in the beginning of ‘The Dream’ part 1, of Bogin’s sequence, ‘Visit to a Friend’, ‘I take a snow shovel, a laundry rack and […]
Beverley Bie Brahic | The Hotel Eden | reviewed by Maryam Hessavi
Beverley Bie Brahic | The Hotel Eden | Carcanet: £9.99 And I carve out the bruises, the fine-bore Tunnels of worms. I slice the fruit thinly, until the white flesh Is almost translucent, I arrange the slices in the new pot from Ikea (I burned the old one), Add a trickle of water And […]
Jenny Xie | Eye Level | reviewed by Ian Pople
Jenny Xie | Eye Level | Graywolf Press: $16.00 The blurbs on the back of Jenny Xie’s debut volume, Eye Level, include the New York Review of Books, Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker, Tracy K Smith and Brenda Shaughnessy. This first book has clearly hit the sweet spot as far as the reviewers are […]
Howard Jones | Bridgewater Hall | May 30th
Howard Jones | Bridgewater Hall | May 30th Thursday night at Bridgewater hall saw synth-pop star Howard Jones return to Manchester in support of his new album Transform and to mark the 35th anniversary of his double-platinum debut 1984 album Human Lib. Jones, no stranger to Manchester, studied piano at the Royal Northern College of […]
Forrest Gander | Be With | reviewed by Ian Pople
Forrest Gander | Be With | New Directions: $16.95 On the back of Forrest Gander’s new collection, the Washington Post is quoted with the comment, ‘A complex reading experience punctuated by intense beauty.’ It clearly takes a certain level of honesty to place such an ambivalent comment as part of a blurb. But there is […]
Ken Smith | Collected Poems | reviewed by Ian Pople
Ken Smith | Collected Poems | Bloodaxe Books £14.99 The slight sense of a jostling masculinity in Ken Smith’s poetry might be part of the reason that it is often described as ‘muscular’. In part, this jostling feels as though it rises from the abundant contradictions of his life and manifested in the poetry; that […]
Great Painters Are Rare: William Stott of Oldham,1857-1900, an exhibition at Oldham Art Gallery until May 11th, reviewed by Richard Clegg
Great Painters Are Rare: William Stott of Oldham,1857-1900, an exhibition at Oldham Art Gallery until May 11th Reviewed by Richard Clegg William Stott led two lives, one rooted in Oldham and its environs, the other outside Paris in a centre for modern painters at Grez-sur-Loing where he made his home. The son of a mill […]
John Koethe | Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016 | reviewed by Ian Pople
John Koethe | Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016 | FSG: $40.00 In a characteristically pellucid essay, ‘The Pyrrhic Measure in American Poetry’, John Koethe’s friend and fellow poet, Douglas Crase, sets out to analyse a particular characteristic of the American poetic voice. Crase links the vistas of the American landscape with a particular type of American […]
Nicki Minaj | Manchester Arena | reviewed by Marsha Courneya
Nicki Minaj | NICKI WRLD TOUR | Manchester Arena, March 18, 2019 Opening Acts: RAY BLK and Juice WRLD Special Guests: Lady Leshurr, YXNG BANE, Lisa Mercedez, and Ms Banks Nicki Minaj gave us a night of intimate spectacle that made Manchester arena feel somehow cozy. The costume changes, set pieces, backup dancers, special guests, […]
Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi at The Lowry, reviewed by Marsha Courneya
Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi | The Lowry: March 8, 2019 Jeanguy SAINTUS’ choreography rose to meet the relentlessly challenging score of The Rite of Spring. Although it stayed true in some moments to Stravinsky’s initial vision of ritual sacrifice, wherein ‘a young girl danc[es] herself to death,’ to honour the […]
J. Michael Martinez | Museum of the Americas | reviewed by Ian Pople
J. Michael Martinez | Museum of the Americas | Penguin: $20.00 J. Michael Martinez’ third collection Museum of the Americas has an interestingly compendious feel which runs from the title of the volume through to the notes and bibliography at the end. An equally compendious sense of ‘the Americas’ as embracing North, Central and South […]
Opera North’s Katya Kabanova at the Lowry, reviewed by Tessa Harris
Opera North’s Katya Kabanova | The Lowry: Thursday March 7th Thursday night’s performance of Katya Kabanova by Opera North at the Lowry was set in a bleak, grey-green world. Director Tim Albery’s decision to play all three acts together with no interval was an excellent one that allowed the intensity of Katya and the cruelty […]
Opera North’s The Magic Flute at the Lowry, reviewed by Tessa Harris
Opera North’s The Magic Flute | The Lowry: Tuesday March 5th Tickets Available for Saturday March 9th at 7:00 Opera North held their press night for The Magic Flute this Tuesday night at the Lowry. The Magic Flute is meant to be one the more accessible and light operas, this was a determinedly dark and […]
We Were Strangers: Stories Inspired by Unknown Pleasures edited by Richard Hirst. (Confingo, £12.99), reviewed by Richard Clegg
We Were Strangers: Stories Inspired by Unknown Pleasures edited by Richard Hirst. (Confingo, £12.99) The short time that falls between the end and start of the Northern bands, Joy Division and New Order, splits the new city region from the old. Joy Division, through Ian Curtis, are connected to the declining areas of de-industrialisation with […]
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Unthology 10, Edited by Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones. Reviewed by Usma Malik
Unthology 10, Edited by Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones. And the question is, always, what to do now? How to act now that the catastrophe is here? Who do you want to be? How do you want to be remembered? A shadow of yourself or the self of your shadow? Fight or Flight? And so readers […]
The Inheritance (Polygon), by Sheena Kalayil, reviewed by Usma Malik
London. A young student falls in love with her University tutor. Married Dr Ben Martin, advocator of women’s rights and author of titles such as ‘Daughters of Africa’ and ‘Gender and Law Reform in Africa’, is a respected member of the academic Faculty. Rita Kalungal, Nineteen, is a first year Anthropology student, and his tutee. […]
Yiyun Li | Where Reasons End | reviewed by Gurnaik Johal
Yiyun Li | Where Reasons End | Penguin Books: £12.99 Whether writing wedding vows or eulogies, there are certain things that we struggle to express in words. “You always say words fall short,” says Nikolai, the 16 year old son of the narrator in Yiyun Li’s latest novel, Where Reasons End. He is speaking to […]
Roy Fisher | A Furnace | reviewed by Ian Pople
Roy Fisher | A Furnace | Flood Editions: $15.95/£12.44 Roy Fisher’s A Furnace first appeared in one of Oxford University Press’s more elegant editions in 1986. It was, perhaps, Fisher’s second great masterpiece after his first real appearance in print, the pamphlet, City. It is a small pity that Fisher’s reputation is often confined to […]