Slow Cinema Slow Cinema You’re late but it doesn’t matter with this one says the man just go on in and the place is empty so the film’s showing to no one and as it happens it happens to be showing an empty auditorium much like the one you’ve just sat down in with a […]
2 Poems
Trim I had him under the clippers. I asked him apropos if He could have been present At one gig in all of music history What would it have been? He thought about this for a while. Little sheaves of dry dark hair Fell about his shoulders. All The blonde goes out of it At […]
2 Poems
In An Orkney Wood Set off through a kissing gate and walk the old drover’s road through Binscarth and Wasdale past the loch to Refuge Corner. In the silver light of afternoon, alder and ash crowd a hoggin track shrubbed with Purslane. This hillside confounds the myth of a treeless north, as the rook-laden canopy […]
Cocoa l’Orange
Cocoa l’Orange Like a crouching battalion, the thirty houses in Heatherbell Way nestle along the incline of the mountain. The McEntee’s long landing window is positioned directly opposite the window of the Kearney’s master bedroom, slightly to the left of its en-suite bathroom. Since the first lockdown, Jake Kearney has spent more time […]
Fallen Stock
Fallen stock Tony’s out of the door and jogging across the yard before the trailer’s through the gate, a sheepdog worrying his ankles. A moment later his face is at Ed’s window, a tired moon in the dawn light. They’re up on the top fields. Do you need a hand getting out of the […]
My Husband’s Doing Soup
My Husband’s Doing Soup A cyclist shot by, passing so close to Elizabeth that she felt his Lycra-covered arm brush against hers. She stumbled to the side, almost tripping over her own feet. He didn’t even glance her way. He disappeared into the fog, the steady rattle of his wheels on the metal […]
An Unravelling
An Unravelling Julie turned the corner into her street with a touch of grumpiness about her. It was raining steadily, though it hadn’t been when she left her house half an hour before, which was why she had decided against a coat. Now she was wet, the rain having made short shrift of her […]
Paul Henry | As If To Sing | reviewed by Jack McKenna
Paul Henry | As If To Sing | Seren Books: £9.99 Sorrowful songs flow from Paul Henry’s newest collection, As If To Sing. These are careful, melodious poems that learn to listen for the watery current that carries love and loss together in our everyday lives. The opening sonnet, ‘Tributary’, follows the speaker returning to where […]
David Constantine | Rivers of the Unspoilt World | reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles
David Constantine | Rivers of The Unspoilt World | Comma Press: £8.99 Salford author David Constantine, the award winning poet (Queen’s Medal for Poetry 2020), short story writer, translator, and editor, returns with his haunting new collection, ‘Rivers of the Unspoilt World. Constantine’s sixth collection of short stories has a laser sharp focus on the importance […]
Reshma Ruia | Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness | reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles
Reshma Ruia | Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness | Dahlia Publishing: £10.00 Reshma Ruia’s, Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness is a quiet, contemplative short story collection that asks what happens to immigrants’ dreams in the age of globalisation. What is striking about Ruia’s debut short story collection is that all her characters are in a […]
Sally Rooney | Beautiful World, Where Are You | reviewed by Edward Heathman
Sally Rooney | Beautiful World, Where Are You? | Faber & Faber: £16.99 Sally Rooney, Ireland’s most recent literary sensation, certainly knows how to draw readers in with her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? Centring around the friendships between the two main characters and their partners, it offers a familiar portrait of millennials as they […]
Kimiko Hahn | Foreign Bodies | reviewed by Ian Pople
Kimiko Hahn | Foreign Bodies | W.W.Norton: $26.95. There is a strong, driving sense of personal narrative in the poems in Kimiko Hahn’s tenth collection, Foreign Bodies. It feels clear that the ‘I’ in the poems is the writer, herself. This is a first person who is almost fiercely committed to the narratives that create the […]
Nicholas Royle | White Spines, Confessions of a Book Collector | reviewed by Livi Michael
Nicholas Royle, White Spines, Confessions of a Book Collector, Salt Publishing; £9.99 What I anticipated, on hearing about this book, was something similar to Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built, a kind of bildungsroman about the psychology of reading. I was wrong. This unusual volume is more of a literary travelogue for readers, writers, […]
Dorothy Molloy, The Poems of Dorothy Molloy reviewed by David Cooke
The Poems of Dorothy Molloy. Faber & Faber: £10.99. Born in 1942, Dorothy Molloy starting writing poetry relatively late in her life and it is a sad irony that, having been accepted by Faber and Faber, her first collection, Hare Soup, had just been delivered by the printers in the week that she died of […]
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Collected Poems, reviewed by David Cooke
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin: Collected Poems. €20.00 (Pb) The Gallery Press. The publication of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Collected Poems, encompassing some half a century’s work, is a welcome opportunity to appreciate the full extent of her achievement and leaves one in little doubt that her poetry, by virtue of its emotional depth and imaginative élan, […]
Sarah Westcott, Bloom, reviewed by Ken Evans
Sarah Westcott, Bloom, Pavilion Press, University of Liverpool: (£9.99) In her second collection – what the poet refers to as the ‘sister’ to her first, called Slant Light – Westcott sets out her intention from the first line of the opening poem: ‘Have you looked, Have you looked deeply – the feeling, the feeling is […]
Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis: Interviewed by Sarah Walters and reviewed by Alienor Bombarde
Nina Simone’s Gum, by Warren Ellis Interview by Sarah Walters Organised by David Coates, at Manchester’s Blackwells. Following the publication of his memoir Nina Simone’s Chewing Gumthe Australian musician and member of the rock groups Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Warren Ellis, visited Manchester’s Blackwells. There, he discussed his inspiration, and memories with Sarah […]
Editorial
August hauls deep green dreaming into the woods. Even the bracken is so high and thick I am up to my neck. I feel its lure – who doesn’t desire to trust in what’s sprung, the emerald caves, to lean in and be lost. So writes Carola Luther in one of the new poems we […]
2 Poems
The Peacock That lumbering train, tarpaulin wings brushing stone chips and dust, that heaving gush to the terrace, keeping vigil over flower pots and threats from the neighbouring desert—always making a song and dance about everything—a block of iridescence against the co-operative’s cream. The spit and crackle of tempering in daal. Heeng laps the morning […]
2 Poems
Goblincore We knew we weren’t right under our clothes — our tiny wings, our fur. We practiced eye contact on frogspawn at the bottom of the garden. There were hens and eggs lying under bushes in their shamble nests – the bubbled panes of glaire between our fingers, the yolk a golden toad on […]
4 Poems
Greylag Get out my way out the way gaan gaan gaan get out out the way out got to get out gaan gaan get out the way get out gaan got to get out got to get out vandaag today veranderen veranderen verander veranderen veranderen […]
You Are Safe Here
You Are Safe Here We’re in a basement, walls crumbling naked onto a cracked porcelain floor and a single candle wicks into flame, throwing silent blazes on the pockmarked face of our host, Lazaro. His crooked teeth gleam white in the flickering glow and lingering shadows dance on the faces of the two sidekicks […]
Ferlinghetti in Derry
Ferlinghetti in Derry In a wooden boat, like Colm Cille, Ferlinghetti searched the depths for monsters that might eat his men – German U-Boats fed on Tory Island cod. So, you can rhyme the city, if you will, with Ferlinghetti – Lieutenant Commander US Navy; skipper in the Splinter Fleet on the open, choppy […]
3 Poems
footprint sometimes sorrow looms for years dark cloud inching closer there’s time to prepare you’re braced for the blow sometimes sorrow comes out of the blue a clear sky never-dreamed of woe – you’re unprepared yet recognize your sorrow at once as Electra recognises Orestes by his footprint be it in mud or sand or […]
3 Poems
Sapphics for Elizabeth Lilburne 1649 Where is he whose patience can suffer one more sainted devil ministering independence? Don’t you think our interest equal? Tell us, did you imagine we would be so sottish or stupid as to bide, cook, sew, mend, seeing our peace & welfare broken down, trod underfoot by one who rocks […]
Gold Diggers Come Cheap
In my second year of training to qualify as a plastic surgeon, I signed up for a research secondment in Amsterdam. Jon insisted on picking me up from the airport. My flight arrived early, and I walked around feeling irrationally annoyed. The arrival area with its high ceilings was dry and chilly, chiller than Google […]
In Praise of Fire
When you stand in front of fire, your clothes absorb the heat and there is a whisper of time, shred thin as a wafer of ham, when the heat is pure pleasure, like the anticipation of an orgasm, before skin cells send a message to brain cells shrieking “Hot, hot!” The neurons fire back a […]
Madrid
Given I’ve been allowed this very special very personal access I can say that on my travels over you on top of and under and around you I have moved more or less continuously without following the least compass direction or straight line rather I’ve been on barely plottable curves natural curves on momentary […]
Object
For a woman of her age, Sally maintains a spirited social life. She has, since her return to Dublin, been part of a group of five that she met at work. Though she is the eldest in the group by twenty years, Sally thinks she does a good job of keeping up with the […]
Blooms Galore
Anne is implicated, folded into his black mood like dry ingredients into wet. Together they make a pudding. A black pudding. Not the delicious kind. Not figgy pie. David claims that Anne has an anger problem. He mopes on the couch. Innocent, and manipulative. Anne waters the garden. She likes to watch things grow. David’s […]
2 poems
OBVIOUS DAYS for Matt Bevis We made a happy home and there we pass our obvious days. Edward Lear They still have their surprises, but there’s nothing they conceal They’re preparing us for: not the new long poem I’m going to write Eventually, or something we’re going to do that’s different From what we […]
2 Poems
Medlock She sails her beech-mast from the woods to Cairo Mill, burrows into darkness under Sun Hill, resurfaces to rock the cemetery in the crook of an oxbow. Winter floods stirred her from her bed – she turned grave-robber, coal-hauler. Ran underground. She’s the night-sweat locked in the stadium’s cellar. You walk between feverfew […]
2 Poems
Saturn Devouring His Son painted at Quinta del Sordo (Deaf Man’s Villa) On Saturn, it is raining diamonds. Soot falls and Goya picks up his palette. He has a choice of four blacks: bone black, lamp black, ivory black and red black. A prophecy declares war on Justice. The very thing Saturn is warned will […]
3 Poems
Gucci Mane I keep diazepam in my car the way an ocean keeps a blue whale asleep like an iceberg
2 Poems
MOSS Scraping into the silence of another empty afternoon, the dogwalker, who never stops, hovers, explores, runs through power-washes. That unknown neighbour leans on the fence, weighs up, once overs the maze of Accrington brick, confirms – it’s nothing but residue after this dry spell and reckons on the amount of silver sand needed. Together […]