‘A Little Body Are Many Parts / Un Cuerpecito Son Muchas Partes’ is one of those rare and lovely things: a poetry book with the original language and the English translation side by side. Poems from Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’ eight collections, written in Spanish, sit beside Abigail Parry and Seraphina Vick’s English translations. During the […]
MLF 2019: Isabel Galleymore and Stephen Sexton, Blackwell’s, 7/10/19, reviewed by Kathryn Tann
Introduced to Blackwells on a chilly October evening are poets Isabel Galleymore and Stephen Sexton, along with their shining debut collections. Both with previously published pamphlets, both lecturers in Creative Writing, yet both with a unique and distinctive voice; each takes their place before the keen audience to read and discuss their latest work. First […]
MLF 2019: Take 2, Jonathan Safran Foer at the Cosmo Rodewald, 8/10/19, reviewed by Erin McNamara
Jonathan Safran Foer has a plan to tackle climate change – but he wants you to come up with your own. In conversation with Erica Wagner, former literary editor of The Times, the writer discussed his latest book – a non-fiction work on climate change that is not so much a call to arms as […]
MLF 2019: Take 1, Jonathan Safran Foer at the Cosmo Rodewald, 8/10/19, reviewed by Joss Areté Kelvin
Jonathan Safran Foer, Literature Live at the Martin Harris Centre, Centre for New Writing, 8/10/19, reviewed by Joss Areté Kelvin Acclaimed novelist and non-fiction writer Jonathan Safran Foer is sharing his own vulnerabilities in an effort to get his audience to question our own. His new book, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Starts […]
MLF 2019: Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein, RNCM Theatre, 5/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Hase
Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: Manchester Literature Festival at the RNCM Theatre in partnership with the Centre for New Writing, 5/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Hase On the evening of Saturday the 5th of October Jeanette Winterson gave a reading unlike any other. Interactive, dramatic, futuristic, her performance was electrifying. Winterson animated the audience with her insightful and […]
Marilyn Hacker | Blazons: New and Selected Poems | reviewed by Ian Pople
Marilyn Hacker | Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000 – 2018 | Carcanet: £14.99 There is a detailed, but never dry, attention paid in the poems in Marilyn Hacker’s new, Selected; an attention is not only to the things she observes, but, and this is a huge part of Hacker’s success, there is a real […]
MLF 2019: Common People at The Cosmo Rodewald Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, 5/10/19 reviewed by Charlotte Wetton
Review of Common People, Manchester Literature I went to the ‘Common People’ event because I crave new stories and new voices. Working-class experience in literature is a rich seam not yet tapped. If I were a publisher, I would be signing up some of these debut writers pronto. Common People is an anthology of memoir – […]
MLF 2019: David Nicholls in conversation with Alex Clark, at the Cosmo Rodewald Hall, Martin Harris Centre, 4/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Way
David Nicholls in conversation with Alex Clark The last time journalist Alex Clark interviewed writer David Nicholls in Manchester, it was, she says, a “mad experience” involving the police and broken microphones. David returned to Manchester on 4th October 2019 as part of his book tour for Sweet Sorrow – a story of first love […]
Paul Muldoon and Alice Oswald: Literature Live at The Martin Harris Centre, Centre for New Writing, 3/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Hase
Paul Muldoon and Alice Oswald: Literature Live at The Martin Harris Centre, Centre for New Writing, 3/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Hase An evening in time, out of time, about time. Last night the remarkable Alice Oswald and Paul Muldoon gave the Centre of New Writing an evening of laughter and reflection. Both poets chose from […]
Macbeth, Royal Exchange 13 Sept – 19 Oct, reviewed by Ronan Long
Macbeth | The Royal Exchange Macbeth has, at this point, been reshaped and diverted in so many different ways, it seems impossible for a director to find something new and explorable in its enduring characters and story. In directing this modernized incarnation, Christopher Haydon definitely gives it a good shot. The play opens with a […]
HarmonieBand | Berlin: Symphony of a Great City | reviewed by David Adamson
HarmonieBand presents Berlin: Symphony of a Great City | HOME, Manchester 1982 European Cup winners Aston Villa have a song that goes, “Aston Villa FC / We’re by far the greatest team the world has ever seen”. Now, I’m all for the occasional self-congratulation, but history – and that slippery adjective – have a way […]
Editorial
It is a truism that Elizabeth Bishop was in the habit of waiting for decades for her material to discover an apt form, something her friend Robert Lowell celebrated in a poem: Do you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps or empties for the unimaginable phrase– unerring […]
Rebecca Tamás | WITCH | reviewed by Rebecca Hurst
Rebecca Tamás | WITCH | Penned in the Margins £9.99 Rebecca Tamás’ WITCH answered a question I didn’t know I was asking. Before reading WITCH I heard the electric crackle of its imminence: from the social media marketing campaign and Poetry Book Society recommendation, to the sold-out pre-publication performance in Manchester into which I failed […]
A Taste of Honey | The Lowry | reviewed by Peter Wild
A Taste of Honey | The Lowry | Saturday 21st September Subdued is the word. We’re looking at a noirish basement. An underground nightclub, perhaps. A jazz trio – airbrushed drums, double bass, piano – serenade us. A brassy looking blonde starts to belt out a song as people move about the stage, draping her […]
Patricia Smith | Incendiary Art | reviewed by Ian Pople
Patricia Smith | Incendiary Art | Bloodaxe Books: £12 …and indeed it is. There is, perhaps, little surprise about the contents of much of this immensely powerful book. Given the events that are reported, and, as Smith would undoubtedly say, not reported, on our screens each day, Smith has a harrowing if ready stream of […]
Sunset Boulevard reviewed by David Adamson
Sunset Boulevard | HOME | Manchester Now, it is 2019, and Hollywood is a humourless place. Caught between wanting to appear serious about contemporary issues while not taking itself too seriously, it finds itself lurching between a politician’s earnest, pained brow and that fevered, rictus grin that Cherie Blair used to wear in public engagements. […]
Three Poems
Girls Rowing after Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats, 1926 What with all the mackerel, and the trees full of birds the left-behind elderly women still see possibility though it’s no country for old men, or so they say, having listened long to the sages or figured themselves in that way. The last to leave – […]
Beehives
Beehives “Cartwright, Patrick, 2nd January, 1982, aged 28, Hewer. Killed by a fall of stone. When filling coals at a longwall face, a large stone fell between two slips and killed deceased. The place had been carefully examined by the deputy, and was found to be insufficiently timbered.” If an asteroid hit […]
‘For a Child of 1918’: Elizabeth Bishop at Seven Years Old
‘For a Child of 1918’: Elizabeth Bishop at Seven Years Old by Jonathan Ellis 1 ‘Bishop is parenthetical. Her parentheses create emphases even when their purpose is to hesitate not asseverate.’ These are Maureen McLane’s words, not mine, from her astonishingly sharp essay on Elizabeth Bishop and Gertrude Stein in which she reflects on how she came […]
Three Poems
REMEMBERING THE AMBOS MUNDOS They gave us the room next to Hemingway’s: the hotel’s best view — harbour, fortress, green wooded slopes right opposite our rusted balcony. Still we’d drag the shutters closed at noon, struggling to twist the eggshaped handle that kept them locked and stopped the wind banging them on the frames. And […]
My Family and Other Immigrants
My Family and Other Immigrants (Mixing Memory and Desire) The other day I heard someone say that one should treat all recollections with suspicion. *** In 1892, nineteen-year old Adolf Ondruš, travelled from his native Brno in Bohemia to Zagreb. In this town of 80 000 inhabitants, the capital of the autonomous […]
Three Poems
The Plural of Unconscious, or Painting The Forth Bridge Single example in the OED of its use being owned, at least, by a volitional subject, is Norman Mailer, of all people, havering, ‘but that may be my unconsciouses speaking.’ Living ten flights up, the sky’s traffic comes to displace street level stuff, […]
Book Learning
BOOK LEARNING A young man emerged from the Tube station looking positively heroic. For a moment, Gareth was uncertain, not quite believing his eyes, but, yes, it was Sebastian stepping into the sunlight, tall, tanned, and desperately handsome—more his mother’s son than ever. Here was Gareth’s only child, back less than a week from […]
The Fates Visit A House Which Is Not Charles Darwin’s
THE FATES VISIT A HOUSE WHICH IS NOT CHARLES DARWIN’S I The Fates stand by the crib. It is midday, but they have darkened the room for effect. The baby’s mother stands opposite them, her hands folded over her apron. First Fate: This child is destined for great things. Second Fate: This child will change […]
The Life of Roberts
The Life of Roberts hello! I’d forgotten it was you today. I’m all over the place this week! What’s that? No, no, nothing to worry about. I’ve just changed my blood pressure meds and I’m not sleeping so well on these new ones. It was like that when I started on the Statins. Yes, […]
Three Poems
Baptism When the brick work becomes important, and then the wall, perhaps the river will help us, offering its taut surface and mild depth, in the way that a horse so loves the alien taste of peppermint, or molasses rubbed on the bit.
‘I know I’m from here’: An interview with Anne Compton
‘I know I’m from here’: An interview with Anne Compton by Evan Jones Anne Compton was born in Bangor, Prince Edward Island. A two-time winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize, she won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Processional, her second collection; and the Raymond Souster Award for Alongside, her fourth. In 2008, […]
Four Poems
Q&A for an unfair world Will this meeting ever end? No. What are we saying goodbye to? Everything. Is the wrong person in charge? Yes.
Transfiguration
Transfiguration An indifferent god raised his fist and before my eyes crushed my son. I stood frozen in the yellow light of the tiny spare bedroom I’d made into a study, breathless at the cruelty. I’d failed the first test. I felt sorry for myself, stunned by rage at the corruption of my new father’s […]
Family Traditions
Family Traditions It was February 29 again, and I was wondering which member of my family would try to kill me this time. An hour ago, cousin Luke attempted to murder me with a rope. My guard was down, damn it, giving him just enough time to creep up behind me and wrap the […]
Time to Murder and Create
Time to Murder and Create I see it all. I see it all, but who sees me? You could say I run the show. Well sure, you nod. From a technical point of view. The lighting-guy gets the cues wrong or goes AWOL, the actors perform on a dark set. But that’s not what […]
Two Poems
To Carolina Kostner on Boléro XXII Olympic Winter Games, Sochi Because I live for the comeback staged in black—cold expanse waiting to be writ—because I love the way one arm lifts in time to what Ravel imagined as a masterpiece with no music, repetition made magic only because each shift intensifies, piston or hammer in […]
Vincero
Vincerò I love my job. I love standing in the darkness taking in the smell of their cooking, a whiff of perfume, or a trace of lemon fabric conditioner on a clean tea-towel. Tony and I stand very still for a few minutes to make sure we haven’t been heard. We come in the […]
Flowers Are Prettier When They Grow Wild
Flowers Are Prettier When They Grow Wild Some people find reading hard. They can’t finish a book in one month, one year, if at all. Some people, and Jonathan knew these people and he liked them, didn’t read any books at all, wearing it like a badge of honour. It wasn’t a problem he […]