I think my hummingbird has a transistor Radio in its heart, that it’s turquoise, and Picks up all the marbles from the garden, To pile them along the windowsill As though such things ripen. His spider Thread tongue shines, sugar-glazed As he drinks from the feeder. Where best to wrap an Ace bandage Is not […]
To be an Epicurean
Pleasure is the alpha and omega of a blessed life, our first and native good, for that reason we do not choose every pleasure whatsoever. Epicurus 1. The last time I abandoned you was at a ball game in between innings with a hotdog in my hand and a hat on my head. […]
Two Poems
Holiday Spilled purple on the cliffs like wine and green as if peppermint chews have melted down a gas fire, white person pink light, full as a teardrop, my heart clawed from wet sand smashed into pies. I wouldn’t be surprised if Eric Rohmer fell on my towel to explain the inevitability of going […]
Sofa
‘Here the heart May give a useful lesson to the head’ — William Cowper, The Task, Book VI, ll85-86 Horsehair. In the 70s in a one-up-one-down shared with George (upstairs), who ironed his curly hair straight and favoured the cravat of Edward Fox in The Day of the Jackal. Back- to-back on the […]
Two Poems
Value Reflections on Joseph Mayer, at the Walker Art Gallery The jeweller reckons up his treasures – lets the words, proof of life, slip to silver goblets. From his window you watch the clock gauge Lime Street station. Departures trouble arrivals – there’s an ache in each welcoming kiss. Silence blooms through you like […]
Two Poems
Some Whales He is still wearing shorts and flip-flops in the office although summer ended for good three years ago now because it also wanted him to stop. He eats his soup like his bowl is a teat. He drives a small Japanese car with a high seating position. He has an ergonomic mouse and an ergonomic […]
The Lamplighter
i.m. Florence Winifred Bedford 20.10.1915 – 09.09.2008 He brought that warm glow the children liked, soft light for jump-the-chalk and pitch-and-toss, the giggling swirl of humbug heaven then kiss-the-girl-and-run-away. In Dunlop Place, Sam Carter was your champion lighter, a beaming glow-worm from dawn to dusk, lighting the dark as you ran home. ‘Light’s ghost,’ you […]
Twenty Three Fifteen
Twenty Three Fifteen Don’t look at the sun. * This is the last thing that you tell me before you leave. Or one of the last things. * You could look at it through a colander. That’s another. * The thought of standing in the garden with a colander on my head […]
Au hasard Pantomime
And the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times? Numbers 22:28 I And the donkey is beaten again. It does not […]
Two Poems
The Desert The desert is in the heart of your brother. Your brother doesn’t even read poetry, but keeps the desert’s book, with that dumb title, where you’ll see when you next scrounge dinner. But the desert’s just one of these kids who make bad jokes at a poem’s expense, you say. Your brother sticks […]
THE BABY IN THE DITCH
THE BABY FOUND MIRACULOUSLY UNHARMED IN THE DITCH TALKS ABOUT THE TRI-STATE TORNADO OF 1925 Don’t bother huddling in the dusty basement. Save your batteries for the TV remote, your candles for the wake. All those stories you’ve heard— how the southwest corner walls, built true by honest men, will hold while all else flattens— […]
Progressive Heart Failure
Another conversation about death: ‘You can stab your heart – you won’t feel it – the heart’s autonomous’ he says. I twist my daughter’s abandoned pipe cleaner into a blue, three-petalled flower. My father’s heart is doing its own thing – racing blood around his body too fast, forcing him to lie down. Only he […]
Two Poems
The Tightrope Walker The bearded grind-organ lady’s Quaker-bearded monkey, depressed elephants, sedated lions, insouciant ungulate dromedaries and belligerent camels will tomorrow be ushered into confinement. With these will go the washing-machine-cum- bisected-jet-engine that spins, that basin of sticky wisps, spun stratosphere that collects on a dipped stick to make edible pink insulation. Stacked like ark […]
Constellations, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
Constellations, The Lowry, 9th-13th June 2015 A stage surrounded by white balloons and some slightly hypnotic music. Two actors enter the room. Lights flicker through the balloons, alerting the audience to the fact that something different could be about to happen in front of them, a play that might test the boundaries. Then Marianne (Louise […]
Selima Hill, Jutland (Bloodaxe Books) £9.95, reviewed by Lucy Winrow
Hill’s sixteenth poetry collection Jutland unites the award-winning pamphlet Advice on Wearing Animal Prints and a new sequence, Sunday Afternoons at the Gravel-Pits. The former is comprised of twenty-six short, single stanza poems, each titled and ordered alphabetically. The omniscient narrator introduces us to ‘Agatha’, a social outsider who is possibility on the autistic spectrum […]
Jon Ronson at The Met, Bury, reviewed by Fran Slater
Jon Ronson, The Met, Bury, 22nd May 2015 From his son’s first brush with the world’s worst swearword, to strange encounters with Iain Paisley, via Frank Sidebottom and experiences of secret terrorist meetings, Jon Ronson told tales of his extremely fascinating life with the humbleness and wit his fans have grown used to. He also […]
Talking to Strangers
‘The sooner the new motorway opens the better.’ I hesitated, holding back the impulse to say something about what we were doing, something like; We can’t just arrive into the hospital without talking about it. Eventually, I said ‘Rachel’. Just that; Rachel. like she had locked herself in a room and I was trying to […]
The Funfair, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Funfair, HOME, 14th May – 13th June The Funfair will be memorable for a whole host of reasons. For some audience members, it might be the bizarre but brilliant freak show from just before the interval, when a blue-headed gorilla girl called Juanita (CiCi Howells) serenaded us from the centre of the stage. For […]
To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lowry, May 19th-2rd To Kill a Mockingbird is everybody’s favourite novel. Well maybe not everybody’s, but you know what I’m getting at. The most studied book on the planet, a feature on more English lit curriculums than any other work of fiction, and a novel that has survived far longer […]
The Call of Nature, The Kings Arms, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Call of Nature, The Kings Arms, Salford, 18th-24th May The Vaults at Salford’s best boozer have already proved themselves to be an optimum place to stage a play. Last year’s The Dumb Waiter from Ransack Theatre was not only a brilliant piece of theatre – it was amplified and improved by the gritty and […]
Dara O’Briain at The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Dara O’Briain, Crowd Tickler, The Lowry, May 11-13 2015 If you’re going to book a night to catch a Dara O’Briain stand-up show make it a Monday! As he kept asking us – what are yous doing out on a Monday night?! Yous can snooze if you like… – it became increasingly clear snoozing was […]
King Lear, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
King Lear, The Lowry, Manchester, 5th-9th May 2015 King Lear is often thought of as Shakespeare’s best and most harrowing tragedy. A brief run through the plot points makes it easy to see why. A loyal and loving daughter banished by an angry father. The same father betrayed and belittled by the two daughters he […]
The Woman in Black, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Woman in Black, The Lowry, 28th April-2nd May 2015 Harry Potter has a lot to answer for. Or at least I think he does. Because if Harry Potter, or Daniel Radcliffe, hadn’t starred in the film version of The Woman in Black, it might have been a little easier to enjoy this theatrical adaptation […]
Benefit, Z-Arts, reviewed by Emma Rhys
Benefit, Z-Arts, Stretford Road, Manchester, 22–23 April 2015 (also shown at the Lantern Theatre, Liverpool, 16–17 April and St Helens Library, 24 April) With less than two weeks to go until the UK general election, and the welfare state high on the agenda, Benefit is a newsworthy piece of theatre that portrays how the changes made to […]
Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems trans. by David Constantine and Karen Leeder (Seagull Books) £14.95
The opening sentence of the introduction to this handsomely produced book reads, ‘Volker Braun is one of Germany’s foremost lyric poets’. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Constantine and Leeder just further down the page declare, ‘…he is perhaps better known, internationally at least, as a dramatist, novelist and essayist.’ Later, they strenuously deny […]
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, National Portrait Gallery, London, reviewed by Ian Pople
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, National Portrait Gallery, May 2015 Madame Ramon Subercaseaux sits tilted back away from the piano on whose keys rests her right hand. Her tilted form creates a diagonal with her head to the right and her train to the left under the keyboard. A colour contrast forms the other […]
The Smiths/Morrissey Convention, The Kings Arms, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Smiths/Morrissey Convention, The Kings Arms, Salford, 12th April 2015 It’s a good thing The Kings Arms is a good pub. A great pub actually. But even in such a wonderful establishment, some may have balked at the long waiting periods between the events at this convention. With a minimum of one hour waiting time, […]
David Der-wei Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time (Columbia UP) $60.00, reviewed by Emma Rhys
If one harbors ‘feeling’ throughout life, one may end up violating the societal demands of ‘actions.’– Shen Congwen The above quote from fiction writer Shen Congwen, cited by David Der-wei Wang (p.41), articulates the unique challenge facing mid-twentieth-century Chinese artists – striving to adapt themselves to the demands of the Communist Revolution while maintaining a […]
Private Lives, Bolton Octagon, reviewed by Sarah-Clare Conlon
Private Lives, Bolton Octagon, 26th March – 18th April Noel Coward’s 1930 comedy of manners opens with two honeymooning couples discovering their hotel terraces – and their exes. Cue the set-up for all kinds of hilarious consequences, plus a glimpse into the new hedonistic way of living – multiple partners, champagne-fuelled parties, staying up all […]
Anna Karenina, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild
Anna Karenina, Royal Exchange, Manchester, 27th March 2015 Swssshshshshsshwishwishshshshshshshwish. People are whispering in the Royal Exchange. In front of us, in front of what has to be described as something of a stripped down stageset (a large white box on a metal floor), several people gather holding candles. Swssshshshshsshwishwishshshshshwsh. The people behind us – a […]
12 Angry Men, The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
12 Angry Men, The Lowry, Manchester, 23rd March 2015 If you were to learn that I was a big fan of the 1957 Sidney Lumet movie 12 Angry Men starring Henry Fonda, Lee J Cobb, Martin Balsam and Jack Klugman, you’d probably expect me to like a theatrical iteration. But you should know I am somewhat […]
Peter Hainsworth and David Robey, Dante: A Very Short Introduction (Open UP) £7.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Hainsworth and Robey have to work within the limits of the Very Brief Introduction format. Their first pages rise brilliantly to the challenge. Swift-moving, decisive, sensitive and suggestive, plunging straight into a discussion of two famous encounters in the Inferno, and illustrating points with well-chosen references, this opening would have made me feel I knew why […]
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2015), dir. Isao Takahata, The Cornerhouse, reviewed by Peter Wild
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Manchester Cornerhouse, March 14 2015 Last year, with The Wind Rises, we saw the last film by Hayao Miyazaki, the man responsible (if we can say a single man is responsible) for making the name of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese Disney, a global brand. This year, we see The […]
Tomaž Šalamun, Soy Realidad (Dalkey Archive Press) €9.00, reviewed by Joey Frances
“La syntaxe est une faculté de l’ame.” So opens ‘The Bird Dove’, with a Paul Valéry quotation, in the French. One of my favourites of the contradictory things Walter Benjamin says about translation is: “all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of language.” This isn’t merely relevant […]
Prue Shaw, Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity (W. W. Norton) £20.00, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
If I could recommend only one book on Dante it would be this one by Prue Shaw. Her scholarship is profound and I think she must be a brilliant teacher: she shows an unusual ability to enter imaginatively into the minds of people who don’t have her knowledge. This book isn’t just “approachable”; it comes […]