Monkey Business We don’t. Put it in a vow, put it in the diary, I’ll meet you as arranged. Take your pick from the usual places: the red café near the railway arches, the motorway where the yellow sodium flares. You’re right to wonder if they deserve us. You’re right that sadness capsizes things: the […]
Royalty
Royalty When I was little, my aunt dreamed of daughters. On the weekends, she would take me, my dimples and my temper, show me flowers blooming in her garden: the ground moist, yellow pansies and sweet peas taller than my four feet. I collected garden toads, plucked one from the soil then another, and she […]
Three Poems
Lorna Grove This is as far as street view goes. New green chainlink swelled by greenery. Sky-coloured puddles network into a pond’s skyscape. A warning sign encircles a family of slashed and circled pictograms. Analogy is enclosure. I am looking for where the woods have the furthest to go before hitting road. An interior, off-path, […]
Relativity
Relativity And even if the story never went, the story goes – when Einstein was on the road explaining Relativity to the academy, his chauffeur caught the gist of it so quick and Einstein got so bored, they settled on a quick change act and changed clothes; (not unlike the time my dead brother came […]
Three Poems
Dilemma That girl with that face and from that part of the world. Who commits daily assaults against ‘th’ yet respects every syllable in ‘strawberry’. With that shape and heft and magnitude of backside. Got an arse on ‘er that rolls like the moors. At The Grove she guides the mop across the floor like […]
Night Music
There he was, a priest in the sun; like an actor on his mark. He looked away, effacing, as if to say ‘I have you’, from the start. ‘I have you’, I thought. I had just guided the stylus onto the first track and as the scratchy hum from the speakers confirmed contact I heard […]
Telling Stories
‘I am not attracted to you,’ Sonja said one night when they’d stayed behind to drink their tips. ‘Well, thank God for that,’ Ruth replied knocking her shot glass against Sonja’s. ‘I can’t thank God. I don’t believe in baby stories anymore.’ Sonja had left Sweden as soon as she could. It was not how […]
Three Poems
A Field Trip History looks out on the playing field and some chestnuts in bloom along the Seine, which is out of bounds. These kids are too big for the classroom. They knock over chairs, fumbling for gear— compass tip to caress, electronics to drop. Outside, on the pitch, playing football, they aren’t clumsy, they […]
I’ve been high
I’ve been high When a Chamois broke from mist thick as choked bonfire smoke, one hoof loosening a river of stone. And again, near Llanberris, spradeled like Spiderman on the angled slab, twisting a chock from the crack. A flight above the Kent as an air-cadet, a green blear under the wing. Terrestrial dabbling with […]
Things I Couldn’t Tell Her
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 […]