I told this story to my best friend Kelly, that crack-of-dawn morning in her flat, when really there were other things I should have been saying – I just couldn’t work out what any of them were. It wasn’t my fault, I was tired, I’d been up all night. At the hospital, sitting with Kelly […]
Three Poems
Hateful Things After Sei Shonagon Juicy news interrupted by a huge, squidgy baby; a man who bangs around between the bed and the door; an indelicate dog woofing through a midnight clinch, not cat-distracted or bone-dreaming; a misled, nude stud who uses the word I more than never and bolts in the morning. (A good […]
Three Poems
Wind Chimes, Too These used to be wine bottles. She is growing, they say, but it is not so much becoming taller as zooming out. At dark she shines a flashlight through the glass, watches the beam grow fat as it runs from her, and says that maybe the sun is just someone holding a […]
Susan Frankie Marla Me
The next morning he’s early into work but I have to get home anyway, because I’m shopping with Susan. Big Asda, not the high street. We like it in here because the wide aisles can contain our conversations, and the ceiling is high enough to cope if she gets the giggles. We put the baskets […]
Lazarus, Hiding in the Chill of a Mountain
A second-grade teacher who thinks herself benevolent writes to Marcus Wing, Inmate #A-04014 every morning for six months before she finally runs down her crime-slimed street to the post office. By then she has accumulated one hundred and eighty-five articles, from decoupage paper cut into the shapes of olive branches and Sacred Hearts to vintage […]
Two Poems
My Stranger hangs where the plaster cracked and the ribs of the house show. He’s the only stranger I can afford, a middle-aged man in a plaid shirt smiling for an artist. Nothing to me, but still I hang him in the hallway and call him dad. Of course visitors have doubts. I know they […]
Three Poems
The Coastguard’s Cottage Tu non ricordi la casa dei doganieri sul rialzo a strapiombo sulla scogliera – Montale We never forgot the coastguard’s cottage out on the tip of Cranfield Point. Still no one lives there; maybe it’s waiting for us to make up our minds and move in? The plans we had the day […]
Three Poems
Rose Here is the rose I cut from the rosebush yesterday, placed upon the ornamental box, a study in life after death. It is morning and you and I have just woken. There is birdsong. Are we becoming light? Our bed is a small Church of England grave, a country place, where the dew settles […]
Two Poems
December I imagine winter returning as if woken from a dream, clambering from the iced rabbit-hole of the field, open-mouthed. The sound it makes coming home knee-deep in the night, its slow feet, the numb toes. I listen for the pain in the white shins of the birches, splinter-trees charred by cold, limbs creaking. What […]
My mother’s house
Once, near nightfall, I drove past my mother’s house. She was inside it, moving about some task. I saw her move from room to room. I could have stopped. Shortly she would draw the blinds but a knock on the door might alarm her who had her routine for night. It was all those unseen […]
Matthew Sweeney, Inquisition Lane (Bloodaxe Books) £9.95, reviewed by David Cooke
Inquisition Lane is Matthew Sweeney’s eleventh collection and his second since moving to Bloodaxe with Horse Music in 2013. Both collections are substantial volumes weighing in at over ninety pages each with Inquisition Lane containing some sixty poems, while its predecessor had seventy. Normally, such copiousness would set alarm bells ringing, but with Sweeney one’s […]
Carl Phillips, Reconnaisance (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux) $23.00
Carl Phillips has long been feted as a subtle and dexterous technician. In a New Yorker review, Dan Chiasson pushes Phillips forward as a ‘candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences’. A Phillips poem may consist of anything between 10 and 15 lines, each part of one or two long sentences. Such sentences […]
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Mona Arshi, Small Hands (Pavilion Poetry) £9.99, reviewed by Ken Evans
Mona Arshi’s debut collection Small Hands won the Forward Prize for best first collection, and her relatively short poetic CV is a comet-tail of successes: Magma Competition prize 2012, joint winner of the Manchester Poetry prize 2014, an award in the Troubadour – she has traced a brilliant trajectory in a short time. Having heard her […]
Daniel Sluman, the terrible (Nine Arches) £9.99), reviewed by Ken Evans
A blood-spatter or tainted x-ray? The vivid front cover of Daniel Sluman’s second collection from Nine Arches, the terrible, (even the title sounds cut from its meaning), alerts you that this volume deals with what Sluman describes as the ‘dark underbelly of our relatively comfortable lives.’ If the endlessly dividing cell that is contemporary poetry […]
The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Lowry, reviewed by Annie Dickinson
The Revenger’s Tragedy, dir. Anne Thuot, The Lowry, 19-21 November Produced and performed by the Belgian physical theatre company FAST ASBL, The Revenger’s Tragedy is less a performance or even an adaptation of the Jacobean revenge tragedy of the same name than a stark anatomization of its treatment of women. The 1606 play, now generally thought […]
Ben Aitken, Dear Bill Bryson (Not Bad Books) £9.99, reviewed by Callum Coles
Ben Aitken’s Dear Bill Bryson (Footnotes from a Small Island)* follows the titular American’s 1995 tour of this fair Isle’s quaint villages, towns, cities, pubs, roadside cafes, bus terminals and Wigan. It is, in the words of its author, a “less funny version of the original.” As a fan of Bryson myself, I confess that […]
Shuntarō Tanikawa, New Selected Poems trans. by William I. Elliot and Kazuo Kawamura (Carcanet Press) £12.99
Shuntarō Tanikawa’s New Selected Poems is a comprehensive, arresting and insightful survey of the Japanese poet’s career from his first collection, Ten-Billion Light Years from Solitude (1952), through to the quite recent Kokoro (2013), and many intriguing points between. In total the book covers twenty-two of Tanikawa’s immensely varied collections, with abbreviated portions from each […]
Pomona, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Fran Slater
Pomona, dir. Alistair McDowall The Royal Exchange (October 29 – November 21) Pomona is now a famous part of Manchester. An inexplicable wasteland in the space between Manchester City Centre and Salford Quays, accessible from only a few choice entrances, it has become a place that certain people in this city are willing to fight […]
Tariq Latif, Smithereens (Arc Publications) £6.00
Tariq Latif’s three previous Arc volumes have shown considerable dexterity over a variety of subject matters. The first of these is, clearly, that of what it means to be an Asian writer, writing in English in contemporary Britain. His last book, The Punjabi Weddings, noted some of the aftermath of the Rushdie affair. In the […]
An Ape’s Progress, Manchester Literature Festival, reviewed by James David Ward
Dave McKean, introduced tonight as “the man who wears many hats”, is a constant collaborator, working with everyone from Grant Morrison to Heston Blumethal, and is best known for his longstanding partnership with Neil Gaiman. He has produced accomplished pieces across a number of art forms, from his graphic novels, to his painting, to his […]
The Oresteia, HOME, reviewed by Peter Wild
The Oresteia / HOME / 28 October 2015 2015s third production of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia (there have been productions at the Almeida and the Globe in London) sets itself apart by running with Ted Hughes’s adaptation, which clocks in at some two hours less than the original and propels its audience through what can only […]
Moya Cannon, Keats Lives (Carcanet) £9.99, reviewed by Annie Muir
Just as Keats himself is more famous for his untimely death than the events of his life, Keats Lives is a book primarily concerned with the continuance of lives after death. Published this year, Cannon’s fifth collection of poetry begins with a sonnet: ‘Winter View from Binn Bhriocáin’. The title immediately presents a highly symbolic […]
1984, Northern Ballet at The Palace Theatre, reviewed by Elizabeth Mitchell
1984, Northern Ballet, The Palace Theatre, October 15 2015 As a cultural colossus of a novel, reworking 1984 will never be easy in any media. With modern ballet being better known for its abstract movement than defined storytelling, it must be one of the hardest. Although doing a better job than many others before him, […]
Golem, HOME, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Golem, HOME, First Street, Manchester, 7–17 October 2015 Memorable tunes, exquisite performances, and stunning visuals the likes of which I’ve not seen in theatre before. Produced by performance company 1927, whose speciality is combining performance and live music with animation and film, Golem is a wonderful spectacle – entertaining and funny with a subtext of […]
Sheena Kalayil, The Beloved Country (Grosvenor House) £8.99
Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country begins, famously, with a prose paean to the South African countryside. Paton’s description of the ‘holiness’ of this ground establishes it as the place to which the character, Kumalo, must return even though the land ‘cannot be again’. Sheena Kalayil’s fine debut novel begins with a sentence which also […]
R. F. Langley, Complete Poems (Carcanet Press) £12.99
This volume is a Complete Poems in the sense that Elizabeth Bishop published her Complete Poems in 1969: these are the poems which Roger Langley completed for publication. This volume is also similar to Bishop’s book in that it is full of poems which seem both perfected and perfect. Perhaps Langley, for whom Pound was […]
La Mélancolie Des Dragons, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
Aging rockers hiding in a trailer, a headbanging competition in a broken down car, floating wigs, ski slopes and fake snow, a bubble machine, and some strangely impressive and multifunctional inflatables. In an extremely bizarre way, La Mélancolie Des Dragons kind of had it all. In other ways, this almost insane mix of components, along […]
Dark Arteries, Rambert at The Lowry, reviewed by Elizabeth Mitchell
Rambert, ‘Dark Arteries,’ ‘The Three Dancers,’ ‘Terra Incognito’ at The Lowry, September 30 2015 A word of warning: ever since I saw Mark Baldwin’s ‘Eternal Light’ aged 15, I have dreamt of being in the Rambert. There was just something about the so cleverly choreographed and very balletic Contemporary dance, with the huge side of […]
So Here We Are, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Şima İmşir Parker
So Here We Are, dir. Steven Atkinson, The Royal Exchange Pidge (Sam Melvin), Pugh (Mark Weinman) and Smudge (Dorian Jerome Simpson) are sitting on a container representing a Southend sea wall, trying to remember who wrote Peter Pan. Is it Walt Disney or Barry someone? Or perhaps Walter Barry? This is right after the funeral […]
Welcome to Night Vale, Albert Hall, reviewed by James D Ward
Welcome to Night Vale Albert Hall, Manchester, 24/09/2015 Podcasts are simply radio for our on demand times, so it’s appropriate that one of the more popular shows purports to be the broadcasts from a community station situated in an otherworldly part of the American Midwest. Welcome to Night Vale, with its mix of […]
The Crucible, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Jon Greenaway
The Crucible, dir. Caroline Steinbeis – The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester First performed in 1953 Arthur Miller’s play has quickly become a cultural touchstone, becoming a fixture of GCSE and A-Level syllabi and beloved by undergraduate and repertory theatre companies for its wide casting and political themes. Therefore, the challenge or any new production is to […]
Swan Lake, Birmingham Royal Ballet at The Lowry, by Elizabeth Mitchell
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake, The Lowry, September 23 2015 With Swan Lake being such a classic, it ways runs the danger of being a safely enjoyable but slightly dull way to spend an evening. However, David Bintley has once more pulled it out of the bag with his energetic direction of Peter Wright’s masterpiece. […]
Petite Noir, Deaf Institute, reviewed by Marli Roode
Conventional wisdom has it that Manchester is a city dedicated to telling and retelling its own story. That every weekend, countless clubs play music made in the city – made by the city, it starts to feel like – and everyone dances like Ten Storey Love Song hasn’t been on the playlist every weekend for […]
The Room, Joshua Brooks, reviewed by Emma Rhys
The Room (by Harold Pinter), Joshua Brooks, Princess Street, Manchester, 28–30 September 2015 I would highly recommend you take 50 minutes out of an evening next week to scratch your head and hold your breath at the absurdity and intensity of a Pinter play. This depiction of The Room has been thoughtfully considered and excellently […]
By Far The Greatest Team, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
By Far the Greatest Team – The Lowry Mixing football and theatre is an interesting but risky move. On paper, the high drama of both forms of entertainment should lend themselves to an exciting combination, the opportunity to bring two of our nation’s favourite pastimes together to create something original and hopefully at least half […]