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 […]
Tom French, The Way to Work (Gallery Press, €12.50), reviewed by Ken Evans
Patrick Kavanagh said that, ‘to know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience.’ In Tom French’s fourth collection from Ireland’s Gallery Press, The Way to Work, the poet homes in (I use the verb advisedly) on a way of life in rural Ireland, that seems almost familiar, to both poet and […]
Peter Sansom, Careful What You Wish For (Carcanet, £9.95), reviewed by Ken Evans
At first sight, the cover of Peter Sansom’s sixth collection, Be Careful What You Wish For, and the poem to which it refers, ‘Lava Lamp’ – a concrete poem simulating, as the poet puts it, the ‘soun dl ess gloo b le/ and gl oop’ of the lamps’ shape-shifting contents – are experimentally atypical of […]
Phantogram, Deaf Institute, reviewed by Marli Roode
I have a really good time at the Phantogram gig. A good time before it – on what could be described as a double date, but shouldn’t be, given the people and the amount of brinkmanship involved – and a good time afterwards (see above re being on a date). It isn’t until I come […]
Billy Bragg and Joe Henry, RNCM, reviewed by Peter Wild
Billy Bragg and Joe Henry, RNCM, 19 November 2016 I want you to think about Superman 2 a moment. Specifically the scene where, having fallen in love with Lois Lane, revealed his true identity and voluntarily stripped himself of his powers, Clark Kent finds himself in a diner on the receiving end of a whupping. […]
Billy Budd, Opera North at The Lowry, reviewed by Tristan Burke
Billy Budd, Opera North at The Lowry, directed by Orpha Phelan; November 10 2016. There is something similar about a late eighteenth-century warship and an opera company. Both are sophisticated technologies of production that rely on the hierarchical division of labour to produce spectacular effects. This similarity was stressed in Opera North’s recent production of […]
Kate Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos (Picador, £7.99) reviewed by Chloé Vaughan
Kate Tempest’s newest collection of poetry demands to be felt. Let Them Eat Chaos is a book-length poem that begins with the admission, and gentle command, that ‘this poem was written to be read aloud’. Though Let Them Eat Chaos is meant to be read aloud, its performance on the page as a written poem […]
Marilyn Hacker, A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994-2014 (W.W.Norton, £17.50)
Marilyn Hacker’s A Stranger’s Mirror is an extraordinary book. A book which runs to 288 pages, and which is a selected from just twenty years’ worth of writing. The poems must pour out of Hacker as if there were no tomorrow. And there is a highly charged, highly pressured feel to all of this writing; […]
Ruby Robinson, Every Little Sound (Pavilion Poetry, £9.99), reviewed by Lucy Winrow
The title of Ruby Robinson’s poetry debut is derived from a line within its pages; the notion of paying close attention to “every little sound” appears in “Internal Gain,” a poem that traverses a gamut of sounds from “the conversation downstairs” to “echoes of planets slowly creaking.” The preface provides a definition of this central […]
BBC Philharmonic, The Bridgewater Hall, reviewed by Simon Haworth
BBC Philharmonic, The Bridgewater Hall; ‘Tragedy and Humour, Darkness and Light’: Sibelius, Tapiola / Kaija Saariaho, Notes on Light / Weill, Violin Concerto / Britten, Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes; November 5 2016. Tapiola, Sibelius’ last great orchestral work before he finally hit the mute button and succumbed to absolute silence at his […]
Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians (Faber & Faber, £13.99), reviewed by Maria Alejandra Barrios
This is the kind of love story that will make you fight for it, the kind that will break your heart and mend it all at once. At every step of the way, it will make you feel that you’re alongside the characters cheering for them or sharing the same doubts as their love progresses. […]
Parquet Courts, Manchester Academy 2, reviewed by Lydia Walker
Parquet Courts, Manchester Academy 2; October 10 2016. Debuting in 2011 with limited edition cassette EP release American Specialties, I’m not sure if Parquet Courts knew they would be storming festivals three years on, and releasing their fifth (ish) studio album two years later still. I say “ish” as their back-catalogue is eclectic: having already […]
Roy Fisher, Slakki: New and Neglected Poems (Bloodaxe) £9.95
Roy Fisher often gives his books gently punning titles. His Collected was entitled ‘The Long and the Short of it’. And Fisher’s New and Neglect’s punning on Selected brings back into circulation a range poems that have been fugitive from the Fisher canon, right from the beginning of Fisher’s publishing; along with a group of lovely […]
The Emperor, HOME, reviewed by Peter Wild
The Emperor, by Ryszard Kapuściński, adapted by Colin Teevan and directed by Walter Meierjohann; September 29, 2016. You don’t need to know much about Haile Selassie to enjoy Kathryn Hunter’s performances in The Emperor, a one-hour, almost one-woman show in which she dons many hats (and shoulder stripes, and walking sticks, and epaulettes, and […]
Giselle, Palace theatre, reviewed by Zoe Gosling
Giselle, English National Ballet, directed and choreographed by Akram Kham, co-produced by Manchester International Festival and Sadler’s Wells; September 27 2016. The English National Ballet’s re-working of the 1841 ballet sees its landscape change from a peasant village to an industrial workhouse, where Giselle (Alina Cojocaru) and her community become the redundant migrant workers of […]
Rambert: A Linha Curva plus other works, The Lowry, reviewed by Elizabeth Mitchell
Rambert: A Linha Curva plus other works, by Itzik Galili; The Lowry, September 28 2016. The Rambert returns to Manchester with a winning combination: a triple bill, a premiere and a raucous audience. The evening opened with the premiere of Flight, choreographed by Malgorzata Dzierzon, herself a dancer with the Rambert between 2006 and […]
A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer, HOME, reviewed by Şima İmşir Parker
A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer, directed by Bryony Kimmings; HOME, September 23 2016. Emma is waiting at the reception of the oncology department. She is sure it is only a matter of time until she leaves. Doctors have spotted a tiny shadow on the lungs of Emma’s son, a little baby called […]
Cathy Galvin, Rough Translation; David Morley, The Death of Wisdom Smith, Prince of Gypsies (Melos Press) £5.00 each
David Morley has had more than his fair share of prizes recently; this year the Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry for his Selected Poems. This beautifully presented pamphlet continues the writing Morley has done using vocabulary from Romani, for which Morley has made a project of bringing Romani back into the mainstream of […]
A Streetcar Named Desire, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Ruari Paton
A Streetcar Named Desire, The Royal Exchange, September 8 2016; directed by Sarah Frankcom. In Tennessee Williams’ 1947 play, a Southern belle, Blanche DuBois (Maxine Peake), is forced to move into the small and squalid New Orleans home of her sister, Stella Kowalski (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), and brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski (Ben Batt) after losing her […]
The Shawshank Redemption, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Shawshank Redemption, The Lowry, May 5 2016; adapted by Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns, directed by David Esbjornson. Hope springs eternal. Any of Stephen King’s constant readers (as the author himself likes to call them) will recognise that three-word phrase. It is the mantra by which Andy Dufresne, protagonist of King’s 1982 novella […]
#micropoem16 competition
For the fourth year running the Centre for New Writing and the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at The University of Manchester ran a #micropoem16 competition. The competition, which was themed around Science, took place between 17 June and 11 July 2016 and asked participants to tweet their micropoem with the hashtag #micropoem16. The […]
Now Listen To Me Very Carefully, HOME, reviewed by William Simms
Bootworks Theatre presents Now Listen To Me Very Carefully, HOME; June 7 2016. Now Listen To Me Very Carefully charts Bootworks Theatre Artistic Director Andy Robert’s self-diagnosed obsession with James Cameron’s 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgement Day. According to Robert’s stage persona, he has seen the film 238 times, and upon entering the theatre he […]
The Poems of Basil Bunting, (Faber) £30.00, reviewed by Ian Pople
The Poems of Basil Bunting edited with and introduction and commentary by Don Share. In 1952, Basil Bunting visited T. S. Eliot with a view to getting Eliot to publish his Poems 1950. This volume had been published in America by one of Pound’s acolytes, Dallam Flynn, although Bunting had little involvement with the book, […]
Love Supreme Jazz Festival 2016, reviewed by Ian Pople
Love Supreme Jazz Festival 2016: Glynde Place, July 1-3. Suggesting that Love Supreme drifts further and further from its ‘jazz fest’ status is a bit like complaining that cats are fickle, or that policemen keep getting younger. But the auguries weren’t good: Brexit, the wettest June on record, the M25 at its customary crawl past a […]
Leabhar na hAthghabhála, Poems of Repossession, ed. by Louis de Paor (Bloodaxe Books) £15.00
Louis de Paor’s bilingual Leabhar na hAthghabhála, Poems of Repossession, is the first major anthology of Irish language poetry for a quarter of a century since Dermot Bolger’s Bright Wave: An Tonn Gheal (Raven Arts Press, 1986) and An Crann Faoi Bhláth, The Flowering Tree (Wolfhound Press, 1991), edited by Declan Kiberd and Gabriel […]
Editorial
The new site-specific show, On Corporation Street, was devised by an Irish theatre company and was commissioned by HOME, whose theatre programme is run by a German artistic director. Anú and Walter Meierjohann have put together a memorable piece of work which responds to the twentieth anniversary of the IRA bombing of Manchester’s city centre. The international aspect of their collaboration feels doubly appropriate today, […]
Amali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers, reviewed by Ian Pople
Amali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers,(Bloodaxe Books, £9.95). The blurb to Amali Rodrigo’s first collection, Lotus Gatherers, comments ‘the lotus flower embodies the promise of purity and transcendence because it rises clear out of the muddy mire of its origins. It represents both abstract realms and the concrete phenomenal world. The lotus root is also an aphrodisiac.’ […]
Scarlett O’Hara’s Dress
On Saturday the 18th of April last year, a grey-and-black dress with black zig-zag appliqué, worn by Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in the movie Gone with the Wind, was sold at auction in Beverley Hills for $137,000. Scarlett is first seen in the dress when she meets Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) outside her store, […]
After Vacationing at the Beach
Hand me the map, you say as you reach for the glove compartment. Construction, and we take a detour home. And because I am too slow for your patience, you push my palm back. What you don’t know: I will break our engagement. How you left your dating profile logged on before bed, as if […]
Swansea, 2015
The friggin’ gabba’s going dubbadubbadubbadubbadubba and the whole front room’s jumping, I really should reclaim my decks; this is not the vibe. ‘Right boy, listen, this is it so far. Yew listening?’ ‘Yup,’ he shouts. ‘Right, listen; In this town of crescent moon day breaks too soon casts shadows too sharp for my memory She […]
The Thickness of Dust
It was a strange room, hung with tapestries no one knew the meaning of, symbols, pictograms of all sorts. The colour red figured prominently. Music played quietly in the background, incongruous music, slightly manic, but which no one was listening to anyway. It was there to carry the dips in conversation, of which there happened […]
Colette Went Quiet
Colette called the day I moved into my apartment, just as I had finished wiping down the last of the kitchen cupboards. The phone startled me when it buzzed awake. I had already spoken to my mother and knew it could not be her. ‘Hullo stranger,’ she said, her voice carefully light. ‘Colette,’ I said. […]