Judges’ Comments: The Green Mile, Frank Darabont’s epic 1999 adaptation of Stephen King’s Death Row drama: the critic thought it a ‘masterpiece’ and argued ‘passionately’ in its favour. We also felt the reviewer ‘shined a nicely ironic eye on the subject matter’s outdated view on women and race, noting the imbalances but setting them […]
A Poem by Winston Ado-Kofie
Year 10 Trinity Bunched up on the shelf, keeping to myself. Store is ready to open, I hope I get chosen. The clock strikes the hour, people surge through with power. Rushing, leaping, grabbing, crushing, sweeping, nabbing. Fingers flex in anticipation, “Oh no! This is an assassination!” Strong, burly hands grab my house, along with […]
A Letter to the World by Sama Sameer
Year 9 TEMA Dear Earth, Today seems great, It’s the beginning of a new year, A fresh, clean slate. It’s a beginning of an era, And the end of an old one. The decade seems bright and new, But I am here from the future; I’m warning you. Some things will change, And horrifically, some […]
A Letter by Paige Hamilton
Year 7 Our Lady’s RC Dear Future Paige, How are you doing? How’s Mum and Dad? How are the brats? Of course, I mean our darling sisters. I’m doing okay, we’re still in lockdown (week twelve to be precise). It’s been tough, I’m not gonna lie. Somedays I’m not even getting out of bed until […]
Haven’t You Heard by Madeleine Storer
Year 11 Urmston He sat in his chair, hunchbacked, with his eyes fixed on the pages. To everyone else he was reading, but really, he was in a foreign world where he could taste the words on the tip of his tongue, hear them as they floated from the paper and chattered in his ears. […]
As the Doors Shut by Josh Cummings
Year 9 Rivington and Blackrod As the doors shut the statues in the town wake up. They walk around the empty pavement which miss the shop go-ers. Scattering across the town as they find the treasure they need. Outside the stadium the floodlights cry for their lights to switch on in the rain and fog […]
Mausoleum Man by James Tyrell Brown
Year 12 Xavierian Oh longest time yiv dreamt, me Mausoleum Man, Coffed in Mummy’s Charnel home stove ’round your stonewings’ span, You Monk brod in yar cell, ‘tween bunkous sellow stone sainwalls, All hued in Olden Woldic green, by lichen spattered greenfalls. You Embalm-ee bequested: just unnatural light for me; So acid lamps cast all […]
A Poem by Jacob Rashidi
Year 7 Co-op Academy Some of us must stay at home And not go out the door Some of us are working Like we’ve never worked before Some of us are falling out With siblings, Dads, and Mothers Some of us are reaching out And looking after others Some of us are keeping busy Doing […]
Liberty by Freya Stanley
I caught the scent of rain as it started to descend from the unpromising sky above. Each droplet of it was so miniscule I had to focus hard to see it falling to the ground. I stepped out of my house and felt the refreshing drops fall gently onto my skin. A light breeze delicately […]
Chaos Rides Our Lives by Fatimah Naser
Year 11 Whalley Range Chaos rides our lives. Schools, hotels, flights, airports, public gatherings all cancelled. I don’t know what to call this: strike 2 of the plague, a chapter from a dystopian novel, a scene from a grotesque horror movie- no words can truly exhibit the bewilderment that’s driving everyone’s minds towards madness. Everything […]
The Cause of the Pandemic: One Survivor by Farah Al-Rikabi
Year 8 Levenshulme Bang! Smash! “Professor Christopher, we need to tell the citizens the truth!” a woman with a lab coat and blond curls told the man beside . “How can we risk our entire company being sacked, Don’t you see! We will all be on our own with our families living in the streets! […]
A Day of Lockdown by Elliot Taylor
Year 8 Rivington and Blackrod I stretch my arms wide into the air and squint my eyes at the bright light shining into my bedroom through the curtains. ‘What a beautiful day’ I think to myself as I crawl out of bed. I stand up and walk over to my drawer pulling out shorts and […]
The Quiet in the Storm by Caitlin Bones
Year 9 Urmston The world has always been deafening. As the world spluttered to life, I’d awaken to the sound of my relentless alarm screaming, forcefully reminding me that I couldn’t live, wrapped up, in the arms of my peaceful dreams forever. With a flick of a switch, I’d silence the screaming and collapse back […]
Prison Life by Armaan Shahzad
Year 8 Burnage Day 1 My name is Armaan Shahzad and it is the 23rd of March 2020. The beginning of the year has been horrible: both Australia and Brazil caught fire, Kobe Bryant died and there were rumours of WW3. Just to make life easier, a lethal disease called “COVID-19” decided that now was […]
Alice Courtney
Year 12 Holy Cross RC Jennifer lives alone in a fourth floor flat near the centre of Manchester. She works from home and has the shopping delivered to her door each week. She’s recently started a diary documenting her lockdown experience. She hasn’t been out for 6 weeks. 8:00 am Morning wake up. Alarm going […]
Three Ethiopian Contemporary Women Poets
Three contemporary Ethiopian women poets from the first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry, Songs We Learn from Trees, just published by Carcanet Press KEBEDECH TEKLEAB Cotton-life This era of exile winds its spindle of raw cotton before the seed is removed and life bursts out, before the cotton is combed, before it is roved and […]
Adam Wyeth Interview with Colette Bryce
I corresponded with Colette in the summer and autumn months of 2018, amid the publication of her Selected Poems. She was based in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne at the time, and our emails covered many of the highlights from her distinguished publishing career. Bryce is Derry-born and was a recipient of the Eric Gregory Award. Her poetry has […]
Waiting for Liz’s Honda
His wife’s hospital room was calm now, and the visitors knew not to visit. Not yet, anyway. He turned to face Greta’s bed. The fresh daffodils he’d put in the vase a few days prior had started to wilt, and the speckled petals looked a lot like her papery skin. The white walls had […]
2 Poems
Outtakes The world occurs to me. I feel my way into the space and cooling air outside, leaving behind an article about the bridge collapse in Genoa, a city I once visited, the sun, now (relatively speaking) level with the upstairs windows, setting, slumping down and to the right, which seems completely insignificant. I destroy […]
2 Poems
Cut the lovely fairies in Sister’s room have blades on their backs and lately Lee sucks lemons for their sharps looks for wounds in snow on his morning walk with Mam fantasizes he is sliced like a pear but today the blood smells real he wipes his hands on his trackies dizzy tries to walk […]
3 Poems
Change It felt a bit like approaching the king in the counting house we had sung about, the frown amidst the glowers of gold-tipped smoke at the hesitant Ten 2ps please, said again as the music fizzed and throbbed and the lights thrilled in their circuits. After the glance down at the tendered coin, judged […]
Nathanial Farrell | Lost Horizon | reviewed by Ian Pople
Nathaniel Farrell Lost Horizon Ugly Duckling Presse $17 In her recent book, Prose Poetry and the City, Donna Stonecipher quotes Baudelaire on the prose poem, commenting that ‘out of my explorations of huge cities, out of the medley of their innumerable interrelations, that this haunting ideal was born.’ This ‘haunting ideal’ of Baudelaire’s was of […]
2 Poems
Omnivore It was prior to the silent parts of your body becoming noticeable you were regenerating heat and skin as one bird lifted on the Lower Zab river, […]
As a child you had a recurring dream where you took our feet off the ground and flew
All night, I keep watch; breathe in on his outbreath, drawing his air into my body. He stares blankly, focussed on a point above our heads. I stroke his ear, but he doesn’t react. Maybe he sleeps with his eyes open. All of them, including the hundreds in his wings. I pad to the […]
A Merlin in the Sheeffrys
A Merlin in the Sheeffrys There is a feeling that is equal to the land, a sense of self that is the journey’s length. It changes, bright to dark, and back again, in moments such as when a hill decides to vanish, prompting the sea to appear, sun-thatched, sun-pregnant, sun-remonstrating, before another bog-dividing mile […]
The Glummest Rook
The Glummest Rook Chris Cusack i. In June 2013, I spent a miserable four weeks as a visiting scholar in Maynooth, Ireland. In an academic sense, it was pretty great, but I was quite severely depressed, even if I still didn’t want to admit it. This was my second stint at the college, after six […]
Field Studies
When, after the guns, the gas, the bodies and the blood, they ask the earth, the earth says it doesn’t understand. The earth has trouble speaking, coughs and chokes. When they return later, the earth refuses to answer anything. They look for birds but the birds are gone. They wait for squirrels, they watch […]
3 C.P. Cavafy Translations
The Bandage He said that he’d stumbled into a wall or fallen. But likely the cut on his shoulder was caused by something more serious. He stood up abruptly, reaching for some photographs on a high shelf that he wanted to hold. The bandage loosened and the cut opened. I dressed his shoulder again, but […]
2 Poems
Matchbox Today I meet her for the first time: a brunette, unlike my mother. She shows me Father’s wallet photos of him dressed as a pirate lets me smell his coat hanging in the hall. She clasps a small black bundle to her heart then hands it to me, a crumpled plastic bag […]
2 Poems
Cello Case After her cello was sold, her bows all given away, little remained of my Mother except for her cello case— That large brown case was almost the shape of a person, though it was only a shell, hard, expressionless, and always a little forbidding sitting in our living room. It was the thing […]
Messages
Messages back under the mountain nourish myself / hunter-gatherer she’ll be coming round Mont-Royal when she comes […]
8 Pamphlets from Rack and Melos Presses reviewed by Ian Pople
Michèle Roberts, Swimming Through A Painting By Bonnard, Róisín Tierney, Mock-Orange, Kate Quigley, If You Love Something, Christopher Reid, Not Funny Any More, A.C.Bevan, Field Trips In The Anthropocene Rack Press, £5.00, Michèle Roberts, Fifteen Beads, Andrew McCulloch, The Lincolnshire Rising, The Melos Press, £5.00, Nicholas Murray, The Yellow Wheelbarrow, The Melos Press, £10.00 As […]
Jan Prikryl | No Matter | reviewed by Ian Pople
Jana Prikryl | No Matter | Tim Duggan Books: $15.00 There’s often a bouncy joie de vivre, sometimes a swagger about much of Jana Prikryl’s poetry. It seems to tilt on that fulcrum between observation and perception, which is a kind of muted introspection. We are often in the presence of someone who feels on the […]
2020, by Alice Barron-Eaves
2020 We must still wake and rise as we usually do put on our best faces our best graces and look out to a world we may not wish to we must hold in our dreams and make new ones hold onto our heads and forge a new smile even bolder than our last […]