Susan Calman, The Lowry, February 22 2015 In ‘Lady Like’, Susan Calman proves that she’s an old school stand up with a carefully honed performance, making much of frequently addressing the audience as ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ and working with no distractions on stage, simply herself and a microphone. It’s such an assured and professional set […]
Ross Noble at The Lowry, reviewed by Sarah Jane Vespertine
Ross Noble, The Lowry, February 21 2015 Ross Noble’s new tour is called ‘Tangentleman’, and there are few more appropriate titles for a performance that veers off in so many directions that neither Noble nor his audience are quite sure how they got to any given point. He summed up his own style beautifully when […]
Peter Sirr, The Rooms (The Gallery Press) €11.95, reviewed by David Cooke
The Rooms is Peter Sirr’s eighth collection. A beautifully orchestrated meditation upon the meaning of the word ‘home’, it weighs in at just over one hundred pages and is thus a substantial addition to his work. By profession, Sirr is a linguist, teacher and translator who, like Joyce, Mahon, Clifton, spent many years abroad. It […]
Togara Muzanenhamo, Gumiguru (Carcanet Press) £9.95, reviewed by James Horrocks
A long line runs through Togara Muzanenhamo’s Gumiguru. It is not just the “experiences of a decade” that makes the narratives of this book, it is the lines of the poems on the page, reaching across from margin to margin. The focus of this book is certainly the stories which are largely based in or […]
Owen Lowery, Rego Retold (Carcanet Press) £12.99, reviewed by Charlotte Rowland
If Paula Rego’s art is, first and foremost, about the body, Rego Retold, containing Owen Lowery’s poetic responses to this idea, are themselves separate nods to portraiture. Romance, though somewhat of a distilled notion for Rego, whose subjects are often portrayed as brawny, animalistic, or openly distressed, is utilised by Lowery to draw out the […]
Scuttlers, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Fran Slater
Scuttlers, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 5th Feb-7th March 2015 Inspired by the gangland style riots that disturbed the streets of Manchester back in 2011, Rona Munro decided to go further back in time to investigate some of their precursors. Focusing on the areas of Ancoats and the Northern Quarter that took the brunt of the […]
A-Bomb on Broadway, Nexus Art Cafe, reviewed by Emma Rhys
A-Bomb on Broadway, 1121 Collective, Nexus Art Cafe, Manchester, 2nd-7th February 2015 A-Bomb on Broadway is a performance-art piece carefully crafted and brought to life by the 1121 Collective – a new theatre company based in Manchester. With A-Bomb, this new amateur group have created a professionally staged and passionate piece of dynamic theatre and […]
Light, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
Light, Theatre Ad Infinitum, The Lowry, Manchester, 3-4th February 2015 A dance show without dancing, a play without words, or silent film brought to the stage? It’s difficult to define exactly what Theatre Ad Infinitum and George Mann’s Light exactly is, but that is not necessarily to its detriment. It is definitely something hugely original. Told […]
King Creosote, Manchester Academy 2
King Creosote, Manchester Academy 2, 27 January 2015 You remember the first time you hear King Creosote. ‘The internet sent me on a date and the guy gave me a lift home afterwards,’ the woman next to me says. Like everyone else in Academy 2, she is wearing her coat, both hands around her plastic cup of […]
Spur of the Moment, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
Spur of the Moment, Deaf Dog Productions, HOME, Manchester, 15-17 January 2015 For the last few years the Re: play festival has sought to bring the best local fringe theatre of the previous 12 months back to the stage. Manchester’s thriving theatre scene features so many small venues and up and coming theatre companies that […]
New Collections from Arundhathi Subramaniam and Brian Bartlett, reviewed by Ian Pople
Arundhathi Subramaniam When God is a Traveller (Bloodaxe) £9.95 Brian Bartlett Ringing Here and There: A Nature Calendar (Fitzhenry & Whiteside) $19.00 Arundhathi Subramaniam’s When God is a Traveller is both a PBS Choice and, as a result, is on the T.S.Eliot award list. Brian Bartlett’s Ringing Here and There has received a slew of […]
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, National Theatre, The Lowry, Manchester, 18th December 2014 – 10th January 2015. It isn’t often that you can say that the stage itself stole the show during a theatre production, but in the case of The National Theatre’s adaptation of Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident you could […]
Two Collections from Roy Fisher, reviewed by Ian Pople
Roy Fisher Interviews through Time, ed. Tony Frazer, (Shearsman Books, £9.95) Roy Fisher, An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013, (Shearsman Books, £12.95) It is often suggested that Roy Fisher the interviewee is a somewhat slippery customer. Kenneth Cox remarks in an essay on Roy Fisher’s poetry that reading an interview with Fisher is like […]
She Stoops To Conquer, The Lowry, reviewed by Sarah Jane Vespertine
She Stoops To Conquer, The Lowry, Manchester 9th-13th December 2014 The Northern Broadsides production of She Stoops To Conquer is, quite frankly, adorable. It’s a little bit Blackadder the Third crossed with Two Pints of Lager, largely camp and enormously entertaining. The ‘northernisation’ that Northern Broadsides do so well, moving the setting from the West […]
Slava’s Snow Show, The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
Slava’s Snow Show, The Lowry, Manchester, 9th-13th December 2013 A shock haired man in a mustard coloured onesie stands gazing sadly out at the audience. The capaciousness of his outfit allows him to seemingly grow and shrink, albeit with possibly the saddest expression on his face ever worn by a man. Minutes pass. The man […]
New Collections from Louise Glück and Joshua Mehigan, reviewed by Ian Pople
Louise Glück Faithful and Virtuous Night (Carcanet Press) £9.95 Joshua Mehigan Accepting the Disaster (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) $23.00 Louise Glück has an astonishing record in the US having been awarded almost every poetry prize there is. Her last book, Poems 1962-2012, was garlanded with praise in every review it received. In the UK, this […]
MR13 Editorial: Manchester and the Other George Osborne
The arts and culture in Manchester have long been grounded in industrialists’ philanthropy and generosity, which have helped to nurture considerable audiences for art, literature and music, audiences who have understood that the arts have a role to play in the ways in which the city has been continuously transformed. The city’s history of philanthropic […]
Three Poems
Kingdom When the kingdom falls apart the turning leaves will perform acrobatics, when the kingdom falls apart it will resemble a fancy dress party with skeletons and ghosts. When the kingdom falls apart it will be on a Wednesday morning, heavy rain, thick white cloud and a light that is particular to the time of […]
Out in the Yard
Out in the Yard The terrible elephant paws at the ground like a new, drunk kitty. But it’s normal to be thrown out of parties, I say. Just don’t outstay your welcome. But what’s a caprioska without lime? We make similar mistakes, the elephant and I. We play good cop bad cop in the afternoons. […]
A Peepshow with Views of the Interior of a Dutch House 1655-60
(after an artwork by Samuel Van Hoogstraten) How we like this eavesdropping with alternating eyes, and how he planned just what we’d see from either side. The dog would always be looking at us, the cat, arching its back, and the conspiratorial busts were above all this, either fixed or floating, depending on where you […]
Tea Party
It was my friend Lewis’s fault. Actually, he’s not a friend, just a person I do some consulting with, a K-street Kommando, more Facebook friend than friend-friend. Lewis was the one got the American Ambulance Assoc. to switch to Patton Boggs LLP, and parlayed that into a Venn Strategies gig. We’re talking a person has […]
Excerpt from In Real Life
Somehow Paul finds himself teaching creative writing. He is thirty-one years old. He is going bald. He is wearing black skinny jeans and a pale blue shirt and a pair of smart, real-leather shoes. He is standing in a large room on the first floor of a university building, holding a marker pen, about to […]
Three Poems
Ode to a Magnolia Tree magnolia denudata Impatient as always, you blossom in the cold March air, even before your leaves have set: impetuous hostage to late frosts, the unfinished business of winter – but what do you care, you want to cut free, feel the sun on your face, to flaunt your big creamy […]
Two Poems
THE MIDDLE AGES We were tipping over like aging trees, our roots rising, shaggy with dirt. Had we missed the storm that did the damage? What had lifted us into brittle clock hands, whittled us into slivers, rocked our boats over into murky numbness? Were we not soldiers in the active army, were we not […]
Two Stories
User Group Disco Stanley and I were happy together, happier than anyone should be allowed to be. White-hot joy. So we chose to celebrate our first wedding anniversary by renting a room at the very, very top of a posh hotel – the twenty-first floor. It was amazing being elevated like that, way above the […]
Five Poems
Horae Solitariae One lady, I recall, the relict perhaps of an insolvent rake, would sit and mutter in a temper out of keeping with her age. I saw her once, and others of the damned, take shelter under the same tree from the rain. So anxious to impress, none said a word while overhead the […]
Four Poems
A Lollipop for E.P. Stuck a Chupa Chup into the ground Beside the grave of Ezra Pound Then jumped aboard the vaporetto To lose myself in the Jewish ghetto Looking for the synagogue That kept moving in the Venice fog Like an apparition in the crowd Where Jews were sometimes allowed. […]
Making Guava Jelly
The girls had been eating guavas for weeks. Guava jams, juices, stews, tarts with latticed pastry, every day the kitchen was misty with the perfume of guava. It was the largest crop in years, the branches obscenely laden, bending under the fruit. Nana always believed the dead came out at night to eat guavas. Guayabas, […]
Three Poems
Key To A Map The stammering footpaths pull your eye across the dyslexic geometry of fields, around blue chip meres and spilling woods. A séance tap of dead lanes turning up as potato cobbles under the plough or leaping the M6 levee between hamlets and barns. All day the fast lane hums with ghost herdsmen, […]
A Son in Iraq
After Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front and Heinrich von Kleist’s The Marquise of O “We both know you’re cynical,” my son Danny says. We’re in my studio, tenth floor, big corner of what used to be a factory warehouse. I’m painting his portrait. C-SPAN on my beat old TV with sound down […]
Three Poems
Guitar, Hanga Roa, Easter Island Eight-stringed and night-long strummed, you prove yourself a necessary accompaniment on these longest of evenings. Bigger than a fishscale, smaller than the sky, how do your songs describe you? Wider than a sardine, narrower than the sea. Sing to us of how, in this world of untimely things, a man […]
1922 – Charles Bemis Dies
Polly poked the dead colt with the toe of her boot, lifting and twisting the neck. Shock, most likely. A weak heart in a working animal was rarely discovered until it dropped dead. She knelt down in the wet grass. Scavengers had exposed two of the vertebrae and a solid, tooth-white hip on the left […]
Two Poems
Nostalgia I too lived somewhere. Life had shape I dream of now: journals and Schweppes, candles stubbed in empty bottles of wine, a painted plank on two wrapped bricks lined with midnight blue vials of liniment and balms for her pulverulent arm skin, mornings spent in the afternoons reading L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune. I […]
Two Poems
Rouen The sky is milk in a late Corot at the Beaux Arts. Khaki and mustard reeds fringe a cackling stream. A peasant with a basket in her arms walks out of wetlands that part for her. When the sun comes out, the volume of the crowd appears to rise as if light were sounded. […]
People Zoo Pint-Sized, The Kings Arms, reviewed by Fran Slater
People Zoo Pint Sized, The Kings Arms, Salford, 4th-5th December, 2014 For their debut production, Manchester theatre company People Zoo chose to present three short plays from local writers. Each of Jumbo Shrimp, Let them Eat It, and Captain Awkward shared similar themes of awkward relationships, but other than that, the audience was treated to […]