Eduardo C. Corral | Guillotine | Graywolf Press: $16.00 There is a sharp, tangy sense about Eduardo C. Corral’s poems. Sometimes that tang is almost literal; these poems are never shy about talking about the senses at their most acute. But that tangy quality is part of the Corral’s style, too. The poems are often organised in […]
Jane Hirshfield | Ledger | reviewed by Ian Pople
Jane Hirshfield | Ledger | Bloodaxe: £10.99 There is a quiet quality to much of Jane Hirshfield’s poetry which sits between the zen-like and the vatic. Hirshfield is not afraid to flirt with rhetoric, but manages to contextualise it with a neatly drawn reality. Ledger is Hirshfield’s sixth Bloodaxe volume in the UK and begins with a […]
Carolyn Forché | In the Lateness of the World | reviewed by Ian Pople
Carolyn Forché | In the Lateness of the World | Bloodaxe Books: £10.99 The blurb to Carolyn Forché’s first full collection for seventeen years suggests that the poems are ‘meditative’. That’s one way to describe them but it might not be the best. The fact that many of these poems are narratives either in the first person […]
Amy Woolard | Neck of the Woods | reviewed by Ian Pople
Amy Woolard Neck of the Woods, Alice James Books, $16.95 There’s a perky, feisty quality to the writing in Amy Woolard’s debut collection, Neck of the Woods. A glance at a few of the titles of the poems will give some of the overall flavour of the collection: ‘All Get Out’, ‘Girl Gets Sick of […]
Sarah Feldman | The Half-Life of Oracles | reviewed by Ian Pople
Sarah Feldman | The Half-Life of Oracles | Fitzhenry & Whiteside: C$15.00 The writer who takes on the oracular and the vatic is offering themselves up as a hostage to fortune. The subject matter may well take in the various versions of myth that are parts of certain types of education but not part of the education […]
London Gothic, by Nicholas Royle ( Confingo Press, £12.99), reviewed by Richard Clegg
London Gothic by Nicholas Royle ( Confingo Press, £12.99) As well as a novelist and film aficionado, Nicolas Royle is one of the foremost practitioners of the short story form. As editor and publisher of his own Nightjar publications, he has been a doughty champion of other writers, often well off the beaten track. The […]
Nikolai Leskov | Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov | reviewed by Livi Michael
Nikolai Leskov | Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov | New York Review of Books: £14.99 The New York Review Books has published a selection of the stories of one of Russia’s lesser known writers, Nikolai Leskov. This beautifully presented volume contains six lengthy stories or novellas, and an excellent introduction by Donald […]
Carrie Etter, The Shooting Gallery (Verve), reviewed by Ken Evans
In The Shooting Gallery, Carrie Etter uses a favourite form, the prose poem, to interrogate and illuminate the fatal attraction in a country with more guns than people. However, her way in is not outrage or despair, but to look through an artist’s eye, in a sequence of twelve ekphrastic poems, featuring images suggested by […]
Robert Selby, The Coming-Down Time (Shoestring Press, £10.00) | reviewed by Paul McLoughlin
A WORLD OF NOT MINDING Robert Selby’s poems are, as the blurb tells us, ‘love songs of England’: they set out to record and praise what’s good and will not allow themselves to get distracted. And what’s good is be found in its people. Even the war can come across as a matter of camaraderie […]
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, places her in the front rank of poets currently writing in […]
Keith S. Wilson | Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love | reviewed by Ian Pople
Keith S. Wilson | Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love | Copper Canyon Press: $16.00 The back-cover blurb for this, Keith S. Wilson’s first collection, notes, ‘these are poems that speak in layers, bridging the interstitial spaces between the personal and societal longing.’ This sense of layers suggests that there is a horizontal ‘flow’ to Wilson’s poems. There is […]
Christian Wiman | Survival is a Style | reviewed by Ian Pople
Christian Wiman | Survival is a Style | FSG: $24.00 In his essay ‘God’s Truth is Life’, Christian Wiman writes, ‘What might it mean to be drawn into meanings that, in some profound and necessary sense, shatter us? This is what it means to love. This is what it should mean to write one more poem. The […]
Arthur Sze | Sight Lines | reviewed by Ian Pople
Arthur Sze Sight Lines Copper Canyon Press $16.00 I had not encountered Arthur Sze’s poetry before and his approach is one of the most interesting and surprising that I’ve come across in a long time. It is almost as if Sze is a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet with images. The images roll out and around in Sze’s […]
Natural Selection | an essay on Carmine Starnino’s Dirty Words: Selected Poems by Jim Johnstone
For those who are interested in Canadian poetry but have yet to investigate it seriously, Carmine Starnino’s Dirty Words offers a portal into the career of one of Canada’s finest craftsmen. Natural Selection Carmine Starnino, Dirty Words: Gaspereau Press, 2020 Volumes of selected poetry are double-edged propositions. On one hand, they’ve been known to consolidate reputations, […]
Ed Seaward | Fair | reviewed by Phoebe Walker
Ed Seaward | Fair | The Porcupine’s Quill Fair, the first published novel from Canadian author Ed Seaward, offers the reader a warped pilgrimage into the underbelly of Los Angeles, trailing in the footsteps of lost soul, Eyan, as he flies low under the uneasy influences of pint-pot street tyrant Paul, and a wandering, dishevelled […]
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay | Cynical Theories | reviewed by Ryan Whittaker
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay | Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody | Pitchstone Publishing Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s new book, Cynical Theories, argues that much of modern scholarship has been ideologically compromised, endangering education and progress. With identity politics rising in global prominence, […]
Aria Aber | Hard Damage | reviewed by Ian Pople
Aria Aber | Hard Damage | University of Nebraska Press: $17.95 Not so long ago, I reviewed Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art on this page. The title of Aria Aber’s first volume, Hard Damage, points in a similar rhetorical direction. The title is a gesture, a performative, which throws down a gauntlet to the reader. It is […]
Pablo Neruda | The Unknown Neruda | reviewed by Ian Pople
Pablo Neruda | The Unknown Neruda edited and translated by Adam Feinstein | Arc Publications: £11.99. Described by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who might be considered just a little parti pris, as ‘the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language’, Pablo Neruda has had a multitude of translators. Such a great poet will always […]
Miklόs Radnόti | Camp Notebook trans. Francis R. Jones | reviewed by Ian Pople
Miklόs Radnόti | Camp Notebook trans. Francis R. Jones | Arc Publications: £9.99 In 1944, the Hungarian poet Miklόs Radnóti was shot while being force-marched from the copper mine in Bor in Serbia towards Germany. His body, exhumed from a ditch after the war, was identified from the notebook in his pocket. That notebook is […]
Thomas Travisano | Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop | reviewed by Ian Pople
Thomas Travisano | Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop | Viking: £18.99 That Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry had autobiographical roots, even as it eschewed the ‘confessional’, was acknowledged in the reception of her work from the beginning. Randall Jarrell, ‘the most severe and exacting poetry critic in midcentury America’ reviewed Bishop’s first book, […]
Carl Phillips | Star Map with Action Figures | reviewed by Ian Pople
Carl Phillips | Star Map with Action Figures | Sibling Rivalry Press, $12.00; Pale Colours in a Tall Field, FSG, $23.00 At a recent reading, Carl Phillips suggested that Star Map with Action Figures was like an EP; a selection of poems that wouldn’t really fit on an LP length book such as Pale Colours in […]
Editorial
The last thing many of us want to do right now is spend even more time looking at a screen, but our reading of new work for this issue of The Manchester Review reminded us again and again that poems, essays and fiction can transport you or suddenly refract your immediate environs into a charged […]
Poillíneascannaí & The Junction
Trí báis atá ƒerr bethaid: bás iach, bás muicce méithe, bás foglada. Three deaths better than life: the death of a salmon, the death of a fat pig and the death of a robber. […]
2 Poems
Late Blight The field had spent years drinking rain and pills. Received infusions, dialysis, pesticide repair. Creeslough breathed again! Its scarred mouth opening, sleep-heavy. The field is threaded through for the new harvest, overwintered. The lambs, cloud-woollen, bounce over orange soil to find a new water, frost-hardy. Some were quick-footed. Some came back later, others […]
3 Poems
All Blue Things I was once a chicken heart; small, singing down the river I was once a standing bear; twi -light claws; rainbow salmon scales I was once an aging man; sat, watching them deliver Our whole universe; dark, backed into the soil And one time when an old skin had rotted blue on […]
Going Downhill
‘Town please’, Lisa offered her five-pound note to the bus driver. He didn’t meet her eye; they didn’t tend to anymore, except possibly to question why this professional-looking woman in her smart red coat and leather gloves used public transport so repeatedly. Not that long ago a couple of familiar drivers would let her off […]
2 Poems
Disillusionment rain glints on the copper beech standard cirrus motionless above that will do – the poem has been here or hereabouts many times and what does it do with its words? where does it take us to? are these rain glints the very ones I think I saw? disillusionment can fall […]
2 Poems
Glasgow Nights The city falls in bursts of light around me. I am falling too. Life in the shape of cars float across the Kingston Bridge. Inside each car, the drivers daydream. Hand on wheel, foot on pedal, driving into the sky; faces calm as mannequins. The bridge simply carries them. She is obedient and […]
Going to my father’s house: a history of my times
Chapter 9, Passages: Industrial Jerusalem the cotton clouds, those white ones into which without a word the breath of legions of human beings had been absorbed. W. G. Sebald, After Nature Map 1, Ordnance Survey map, Gorton, Lancs ,CW12,1935 Lines. In this Ordnance […]
The Castleford Sutra
The Castleford Sutra “is it not delightful to have a friend come from afar?” Confucius I. Descent My Lord the Bodhisattva Mahasattva looks down as the obese and diabetic roll along Methley Place on mobility scooters, considers descent, whose aid, if any, he might enlist, his own fallibility. Dawn but no sunrise. Chris Stanton […]
The Rainbow of Hope by Grace Greaves
Year 9 Altrincham Lizzie ran home from school, rushed into her flat and sat beside her mum in front of the TV. The Prime Minister was on the screen again, gesturing and addressing the country about the current situation. Just since last week comments, research and information about coronavirus had flooded the internet, spilling out […]
Judges Comments: The Graham Greene Film Review Competition
On behalf of my fellow judges, Emma Clarke and Jo Wilson, I would first like to congratulate the organisers of this first Graham Greene Film Review Competition, and then, most heartily, commend all those who entered this inaugural contest which has, of course, taken place in the dark shadow […]
Winning Review: Andrew Key for Fruitvale Station
Judges’ Comments: Fruitvale Station, a searing 2013 docu-drama about the last day in the life of a young African American man shot by police in the San Francisco Bay area in 2008. We thought: ‘The writing is controlled and intelligent and denotes the reviewer’s admiration for the film while allowing the reader to make up […]
First Runner-Up: Catherine O’Sullivan for The Assistant
Judges’ Comments: The very, very close first runner-up was Kitty Green’s recent The Assistant, a claustrophobic drama set in a film production office. This, we all agreed, was ‘an impressive review that flows easily between critiquing the film itself and a dialogue about the world it exposes. There is an intelligent analyst at work here.’ […]