A new season, a new issue of The Manchester Review, and this year a new editor. Which, as it turns out, is me. I’ve had some big shoes to fill. Lucy Burns, the review’s last co-editor, left to complete her PhD and John McAuliffe, the review’s head editor, will be on leave until this August. […]
Five Poems
Raw Papers ask the trees what to write they’ll tell you the trees ask a kid and he’ll tell you how it sucks to be young then folks swing on you just swing on you and you break
Lost and Found
Millions of people passed through the stations of Greater Tokyo every day. In the to and fro of daily life, it wasn’t surprising that things got lost. And when a person noticed they’d misplaced something belonging to them, they would, logically, head to the Lost and Found Office. Genichi Ogawa worked in the Lost and […]
Two Poems
POEM WITH NOTHING IN IT In this poem everything happens at once And keeps on happening. Want a second opinion? Sorry. It’s the eternal present, Only here, in your world. Not much fun, is it? All present moments are freaked By moments past, And by implication, therefore, The ghosts of moments future. Comeuppance comes […]
Three Poems
FACE In one language at least it sounds like “rooster.” And before seeing the day I see crescents swaying under, and someone’s face clear in them, a dense flush of pink, and then a wind again, it goes under. I fell in love with the taut skin of the café chain-smoker. He had a trimmed […]
Three Poems
MANET ET OLYMPIA She is looking and knows the pose, the drift of eye through skin. Her orchid falls. He paints its mouth, full of sex and rust, soured from being kept in water. A few knots of gold, her hair opaque, a muted sound. The maid knows these things: gardens rushing from living to […]
Two Poems
LIGHT AND YEARS I remember how she rewound the VHS each time I pleaded to see the Falcon sail free from a dead star’s fiery pointillism. Or, how he leaned back, answered, We waited for it to end, when I asked, What did you do in the camp? Years later, it’s difficult to say who […]
Two Poems
Skøg Urban Hub Elegy i.m. Ivan Blatný While outside spring is warming up the land, you’re sitting here with me in this café, a little chilly, as you’ve slept in clay so long, a little tremor in the hand, but otherwise you’re fine as you take in the place you left some eighty years ago. […]
Two Poems
A NEW DESCRIPTION OF THE WORLD The weather girl warned us of the weather to come but we could not imagine it: black crows like emissaries of a missionary church shaking the rain from their black hoods. Soon the sea walls were taking their punishment and the one road leading somewhere was losing ground to […]
Plea
Plea How when a body dies it becomes the body. No mind to all the mouths who named it, who knew it in quiet, who call for it now, unanswered. But know it: bear the cells’ leaking out and pooling where they’re pulled to, bluebottles lapping at these final outputs, fur around their mouths bloodied […]
Cain
Cain the truth is that I never loved the land this dirt communion my father’s blackened fingernails desperate cupping blossoms his lips babbled out of names each day he tracks the sun and like a blind runt loses himself winced shivering sore hands twitching broth to his mouth in firelight given to wrinkles mother a […]
Three Poems
Late Summer Lament When feeling turns, finally, into burden there is shame and a moment known in human terms as letting go. This happens often in late summer in a smoky clearing, bee-cloud brooding gilded lace beside a tent. In the end, a sleeping man can blend into a hare softening in the briar, soon […]
Two Poems
A Woman Like Me The woman who sits in the square handing out oranges Is the woman who combs the hair of Jesus In the Basilica. The woman I would be If I were not selfish and an unbeliever. This woman arranges gladiolas on the altar For every funeral. She is happy to think Of […]
Dusk
DUSK so we choose to remember some earlier version when you were ablaze and caught red-handed stretched and striving collecting all you thought you were owed or further back before the cognac glow and the inexplicable temper before the new claws of winter began to show themselves and before the pale creep of dusk which […]
The Good People from the West
The Wall had been down for three years when I first talked to somebody from the former GDR, not in Germany but in the community room of a hostel in Truckee, where I was waiting for a phone call from the police. My rental car had been stolen – and with it, my money, passport, […]
The Fashion Fit
Ray felt a hand on his shoulder and looked behind him. ‘What are you drinking?’ asked Mr. Hudson. ‘I just had a coffee while I was waiting.’ Mr. Hudson addressed the barman. ‘Sim, another coffee. Large Scotch for me.’ He turned and headed over to a table without inviting Ray to follow. Ray took his […]
Rhubarb
Stanley is up early cutting the rhubarb. He uses the heavy knife with the weathered handle. He curses when a stalk is stubborn, or the knife cuts his thumb instead of the rhubarb. He invokes our saviour and all the saints. He puts the rhubarb in the big pan with the lost lid. Some is […]
Upon the River’s Bank Serene
Upon the river’s bank serene, a fisher sat where all was green and looked it. He saw, when light was growing dim, a fish – or else the fish saw him – and hooked it. He took, with high erected comb, the fish – or else the story – home and cooked it. Recording angels […]
Witch
Thir’s this new lassie in oor Regi class an she’s a pure mad gothic chick. Her name’s Frieda but she likes gettin cawed Friday, an she’s always wearin black eye liner an bright white foundation an a big mad leather trenchcoat. Aw the folk in oor class are sayin she looks lik a witch. She […]
Two Poems
I See You It has been a meatless season and a muted harvest. Dead fruit warps from the trees. We watch it like something forbidden. The bald mice I found in the cellar this morning linger like grease smears even after Sister drew the dead things out. Absence in this house is curdled in sour […]
Wolf Alice | Etihad Stadium | June 19th
Wolf Alice | Etihad Stadium | June 19th Wolf Alice is hardly what you would call an opening act, but then the Foo Fighters aren’t just any band to open for. Following West Yorkshire indie darlings The Cribs, Wolf Alice played an hour-long set for the some 60,000 fans and small flock of birds that […]
Gerður Kristný, Drápa/The Slaying, reviewed by Ian Pople
Gerður Kristný Drápa, The Slaying, trans. Rory McTurk, Arc Publications: £10.99
War Horse | The Lowry
War Horse | The Lowry | 16 – 30 June 2018 After 8 years in London’s West End and several sold out tours across the UK, the National Theatre’s production of War Horse has undoubtedly become a British phenomenon. Part of the story’s charm is that it relies on a heavy dose of nostalgia for […]
The Drill | HOME
The Drill | HOME | 15–16 June 2018 Do you know how to save a life? Do you know how to administer CPR when all around you are losing their heads and blaming it on you? Whether a rehearsal or the real thing, The Drill serves as a reminder that it may take more than […]
David Calcutt, The last of the light is not the last of the light, reviewed by Ken Evans
The last of the light is not the last of the light by David Calcutt, Fair Acre Press: £9.99 David Calcutt’s first full collection from small, independent press Fair Acre, is pre-occupied with rites of passage, and above all, death, and the transformative power it thrusts upon us. The book opens with a quote from […]
Michael O’Neill, Return of the Gift, reviewed by Ian Pople
Michael O’Neill Return of the Gift Arc Publications £9.99 In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor comments that, for the Romantics, ‘The artist doesn’t imitate nature so much as he imitates the author of nature.’ Perhaps it is because Michael O’Neill has studied the Romantic poets for most of his academic career, that his own […]
Happy Days | Royal Exchange | Samuel Beckett
Happy Days | Royal Exchange | May 25th – June 23rd We find ourselves in the Royal Exchange, in the company of Maxine Peake again, having seen her Hamlet, her Miss Julie, her Skriker, her Queens of the Coal Age. For Beckett’s Happy Days, we find her buried, at first, up to her middle, and […]
Swan Lake / Loch na hEala | Lowry Theatre: Week 53
Week 53 | The Lowry | Swan Lake / Loch na hEala | Michael Keegan-Dolan & Teac Damsa Swan Lake / Loch na ehEala won the Irish Times Theatre Award in 2017, and came to the Lowry as part of the 12-day Week 53 ‘Festival for the Curious’. Michael Keegan-Dolan is considered a leader in […]
City Calm Down | The Deaf Institute
City Calm Down | The Deaf Institute | May 23rd The Deaf Institute has views. There’s a long bar for leaning, a raised, glass-enclosed platform for those who like to watch from the side like Salieri in Amadeus, a standard pit in front of the raised stage, and a stair-step bleacher gallery where you can […]
Too Many Zooz | Gorilla
Too Many Zooz | Gorilla | May 16th The Wiki-quote that Too Many Zooz are ‘well known for Pellegrino’s characteristic dance moves’ really doesn’t cover licking the full length of a black diamond-encrusted baritone sax. But it does point to how it is hard to tell your friend why they’ve got to come with you […]
Long Day’s Journey Into Night, reviewed by Sima Imsir Parker
Long Day’s Journey Into Night | HOME The famous first sentence from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has perhaps been repeated too many times already, ‘”Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Nonetheless, it is almost impossible not to remember when thinking about Eugene O’Neill’s prime work, Long Day’s Journey into Night. Perhaps due to autobiographical details of […]
Three Pamphlets: Ling di Long, Finishing Lines, and The Museum of Truth, reviewed by Ian Pople
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, Ling di Long, Rack Press £5; Ian Harrow, Finishing Lines, Rack Press £5; Nicholas Murray, The Museum of Truth, Melos £5 Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch has been cited as a successor to the ‘narrative’ school of British poetry; a school which perhaps reached its apogee in the writing of James Fenton and Andrew Motion in […]
Richard Scott, Soho, reviewed by Nell Osborne
Richard Scott | Soho | Faber & Faber Richard Scott’s debut poetry book, Soho, comes after his pamphlet Wound won the 2016 Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets. Whilst reading it on the bus, I overheard a woman tell her friend that she hopes her baby son will ‘turn out gay’ so they can ‘watch […]
Of Mice & Men at 02 Ritz
Of Mice & Men | 02 Ritz | April 23rd Of Mice & Men, on tour round Britain at the moment, are a fairly new, high energy, American metalcore quartet – not, as I originally thought, a staging of John Steinbeck’s classic novel of the same name (in my defence, Of Mice and Men was […]
E.J. Koh, A Lesser Love, reviewed by Ian Pople
E.J. Koh, A Lesser Love, Pleiades Press £12.75 E.J. Koh’s A Lesser Love is the prize winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry and comes with back cover puffs from D.A. Powell and Timothy Donnelly. It contains a wide range of poems, registers and style. And it also contains a lot of anger, […]