Thinning Apples at Ludag Gone untrimmed, when the yield came down perhaps I’d think that I was rich – buckets and basins running over. But all would be small: small blushed skin small stiff core – maybe of no use unless for pickling or stewing or practising to split them open, like a clasped book, […]
Condition
My next door neighbour is a Jehovah Witness, and sometimes she puts their leaflets through my door. I like the pictures on the front, crudely-drawn waterfalls and rainbows, the human figures all decked out in national costumes. Inside it’s stuff about Jesus coming any day to smite us, with comments in the margins by Shelia: […]
Three Poems
Shetland Swop I’ll swop you my wheatear for your ringed plover, my lapwing for your rock pippet, this bevy of seals for your noisy hanging cliff-garden of two thousand nesting guillemots. If you can spare me two miles of pink thrift I’ll give you a broadside of tammie nouries and all my spare bonxies. As […]
Three Poems
From a Bonfire There’s plenty I miss, still, that I wouldn’t want back – which I’m beginning to think might be all regret’s ever had to mean, and there’s maybe no shame, then, in having known some and, all these years, I’ve pretty much been wrong. Not that being wrong means wasting time, exactly. What […]
Three Poems
Notes on Mary Torrance (‘Mary is Mary’) Career spanning four decades, seventy-four essays, eleven collections. Formal poems; decline in moral values. Hated free verse in Poetry ’86, ‘The devil Whitman ruined it for everyone’ and in Paris Review ’92, ‘The New York Pre-School, why no one is counting’. Her book, Beat, Stick, ‘Howl’: Barefoot / […]
Three Poems
Cod with the Voice of a Cantor Still we send the trawlers out, although no one alive has heard the song, and no one dead will tell. Boat after boat hauls back, and captains hold their silent ground on decks of gasping contraband to listen for a note, a tentative first ‘O’ among the mottled […]
Days of the Dead
Tom had chosen Whitby, a pretty port on the North East coast, for our first group weekend away. He had a rather tiresome interest in nautical matters and particularly eighteenth century swashbuckler, Captain Cook, but he had never been to ‘the town at the epicentre of Cook’s early career.’ ‘Cook was the finest British explorer, […]
Show and Tell
The night before my show and tell I couldn’t sleep at all. I had told the other girls that they had no cause for worry because I was going to bring something exceptional and could they please let go of my arm. The only girl who didn’t threaten me was the saintly Zhu Chen. She […]
Three Poems
On Latterly Overcoming Last October’s Loss for Rosa Tomalin Laugh out loud, oh lover of levity, our lingering optimism lightens our load. Observe, lover, our lashings of luxurious ornament: lilac oil, Lebanese ocarinas, legumes, oriental lanterns, oranges, lemons or limes; O listful of lissom, obdurate, lifely objects, lighting opulently like old-fashioned lamp-posts onto liveries of […]
Aren’t You Danny Mann?
The police officer looks like a young Ray Winstone and he might turn bad-cop if you don’t answer. “Name?” he repeats. “I’m not who you think I am,” you say, leaning in towards the twin-spool tape recorder. Ray raises an eyebrow. “Who aren’t you?” “Danny Mann. I just look like him.” “That’s bullshit, Danny.” “I’m […]
Another day he might have simply changed the wheel
Another day he might have simply changed the wheel Smoke mountains the will of concrete under the cluster bomb The fallout rains us birds. We kill them! We eat them! The flesh of the birds delivers word that a roadside mechanic kills a man who’s come to have his wheel replaced. He kills using the […]
My War Against The Invisibles
The invaders came like thieves in the night. No one ever saw them, no one ever knew of them apart from their effects. They showed up the morning following the night of the meteorites, which can’t be a coincidence. They came in something. Things fell to earth around there in the wee hours, and from […]
Two Poems
Love after Douglas Sirk Take me to the country club in my red dress. Make me locally infamous. Fix me a Martini—Dry— I am getting weepy. I almost want to die. O take me, please, to the clinic in Zurich. I’m not being ironic— I cannot see to see! You—you have blinded me! Be my […]
Divination Isn’t What It Was
Divination Isn’t What It Was The pay-as-you-go syndrome catches up with you. This morning all my tags were apathetic or empty. It was overcast, impatient and grey. I went out amongst leaf litter that seemed glum. I looked into clouds for divination. I couldn’t construe their puffy encryptions. Newsprint melted into the driveway. There were […]
Paper
I’m moving out, was the first thing Noriko said to me. As I was moving in at the same time — she’d sidestepped me as I struggled up the stairs with an armful of folders — this was a little disconcerting. My feelings must have shown in my face, because she raised a hand to […]
Two Poems
The Beautiful World 1. You cannot reach the beautiful world. It is everywhere and nowhere. It thinks we do not know, but we do. 2. Once I glimpsed it. My sister opened the door and ran through. She vanished among the trees beside the lake. The rest of us returned to our tasks. […]
Three Poems
Search History I can’t read properly at work, I can’t shop productively as ‘adult bike’ brings pornography. I can’t browse articles edgy enough to mutter ‘fuck’ and ‘life drawing’ comes up blank but a search for ‘mature cheddar’ presses buttons I’d rather not have to go figure, though even I can understand an obvious failure […]
The Elements House
The Elements House A gap in the woods. See the house through the cordon of trees. Hear the wind chimes. Crows. Black dog scraping at the back door. Left to the elements, the house lies in state- a mouldering woodland creature, demonstrating each stage of death. Sinew stretched to its limits, the roof folds. The […]
From City Gate, Open Up
Translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang. Sounds 1 Around age six or seven I composed a musical invention: to the sounds of car horns I hummed a tune in counterpoint. Together these two sounds defined the metropolis for me. As dream became reality, the proliferating noises of the metropolis (particularly the sounds of drills […]
The Answer to Your Question is Yes, but Not as Some Unremitting Paradise
The Answer to Your Question is Yes, but Not as Some Unremitting Paradise Once you get entranced by what birds can do in winter— stark murmurations against a grey sky, seed pods scavenged in a landscape that looks blank and nearly dead—you forget that the stone statues on the parish lawn have some meaning too, […]
A Good Visit
I shouldn’t be here, I think, when my father answers the door, his face closing over with suspicion. But after a moment, and a grunt, he lets me in. I hold out a bag of White Rabbit sweets—still his favourites, as far as I know. He takes it wordlessly and goes to place it in […]
Coming from the Mill
Coming from the Mill Close to midnight, we finish the first puzzle we bought from the Arndale. For the first time since you told me, we try drowning the silence with kissing. It’s a jigsaw of a Lowry painting, and it’s pretty tough because all those half-bent spines and hats coming from the mill look […]
The House of Bernarda Alba, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Simon Haworth
The House of Bernarda Alba, by Federico Garcia Lorca (trans. Jo Clifford), directed by Jenny Sealey; Royal Exchange Theatre and Graeae Theatre Company, February 3 2017. A grey linen rag plummets from the lighting rig it has been hanging from, falls down towards the bare and worn floorboards of the stage floor and stops short […]
Penguin Modern Poets 1, reviewed by Lucy Burns and Callum Coles
Penguin Modern Poets 1, If I’m Scared We Can’t Win: Emily Berry, Anne Carson, Sophie Collins (Penguin Books, £7.99). L I have a few of the Penguin Modern Poets collections from the first series on my shelves, I think maybe the Levertov/Rexroth/Williams and the Corso/Ferlinghetti/Ginsberg, and I vaguely remember paying over the odds for the […]
Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick For Another World, reviewed by Simon Haworth
Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick For Another World, (Jonathan Cape, £16.99), 304 pp. This collection of short stories rides quickly off the back of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Booker Prize listed novel Eileen. Many of the stories within her new book share some thematic or tonal DNA and architecture with that novel, if not being quite as generically inclined […]
The Island, The Sea, The Volunteer & The Refugee, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Island, The Sea, The Volunteer & The Refugee, directed by Susan Roberts for PUSH festival 2017; HOME, January 15 2017. When we were handed our tickets we were told to hold onto them tightly; they were our papers, and we would need them to cross the border into Kos. The lift opened and a […]
The Trial, HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke
The Trial, directed by Craig Sanders; HOME, January 16 2017. There is much to admire in this impressive adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, adapted and performed by the young Manchester theatre company People Zoo Productions. Set on a stage piled with jagged mounds of junk, cupboards, empty picture frames, the production design recalls […]
Jacob Polley, Jackself, reviewed by Joe Carrick-Varty
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Jacob Polley, Jackself (Picador, £9.99), 80 pp. Jacob Polley’s new book, Jackself, is a collection of story poems, snippets of conversation, thinking and remembering. The poems are unified by the character of Jackself, a shapeshifter who emerges, along with Jeremy Wren and other members of his gang, to surprise the reader across the collection. Jackself […]
Cathy, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Fran Slater
Cathy, by Abi Taylor, directed by Adrian Jackson; The Royal Exchange, January 12 2017. How do you solve the problem of homelessness? I know that’s not the kind of question you normally expect to be faced with when you head online to check out what shows you should be going to see in the next […]
Sweet Charity, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild
Sweet Charity, by Neil Simon, directed by Derek Bond; The Royal Exchange, January 6 2017. It took about five years for the word ‘screwball’ to shift from baseball slang (1928) to the way in which a certain kind of comedy was viewed (some wag used the word to describe a Carol Lombard film back in […]
Christian Wiman, Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems, reviewed by Ian Pople
Christian Wiman, Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems (Farrar, Strauss and Giraux, $26.00). Towards the beginning of his wonderful prose book, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Christian Wiman comments, ‘I grew up in a flat little sandblasted town in West Texas: pumpjacks and pickup trucks, cotton like grounded clouds, a dying strip, […]
Ruth Sharman, Scarlet Tiger (Templar Poetry, £10)
Ruth Sharman’s Scarlet Tiger comes some time after her first collection, Birth of the Owl Butterflies; its title poem a second place winner in the Arvon Poetry Competition. In this book too, there are poems about butterflies and Sharman’s father. Indeed the interest in, near obsession with, butterflies is clearly inherited from her father, as […]
The National Ballet of China, The Peony Pavilion, The Lowry, reviewed by Zoe Gosling
The Peony Pavilion was originally a play written by Tang Xianzu and first performed in 1598. Most commonly and traditionally performed as an opera with a running time of over twenty hours, this retelling came about in 2008 when the then artistic director of the Chinese National Ballet, Zhao Ruheng, approached choreographer Fei Bo to […]
Der Rosenkavalier, Opera North at The Lowry, reviewed by Ashley McGovern
Der Rosenkavalier, Opera North at The Lowry, directed by David McVicar; November 9 2016. In the Act III of Der Rosenkavalier, after he has been subject to the torments of a farcical trap to expose him as the grasping, bewigged horndog that he is, the bewildered Count Ochs says to his avengers ‘so this has […]
Ghosts, HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke
Ghosts, directed by Polly Findlay, HOME; November 23 2016. Niamh Cusack is playing Helen Alving. She casually leans against a door frame, drinking milk from the carton that she’s taken from a fridge, as she watches the local priest, Pastor Manders (Jamie Ballard) simultaneously be conned into believing he is to blame for a fire […]