Lockdown It’s you and the view of the lamp posts, the pressed pavements and windows, clamped cars and drains that have stopped swallowing city sewage. It’s you in the toilet taking decadent minutes to stare at soap in the cupboard of the mirror—you think of what you’re yet to examine in your bathroom. In […]
Still Changing, by Jennifer Nuttall
Still Changing When the government told us to stay in our homes I grew bricks for feet. I watched each day unfold through spyhole eyes. Outside of myself was a world seemingly slowed to only a glass-portioned sun moving shadows across empty streets, and the sound of sirens just beyond my periphery. My mind was […]
Yoga with Kassandra, Nina Reljić
Yoga with Kassandra Some thoughts weigh enough to throw a body off balance e.g. fearing life touched by death, the spit of life which carries death, the grease of life, the talk of it. Kassandra’s face on my screen is hardly real, she has the stretch of gum while I am a mesh of nerves […]
Inside, by Adrienne Elliott-Wilkinson
Inside Thumping against the wall I think it’s a washing machine the sound of life going on outside of the body, the sound of a washing machine or maybe — you couldn’t call it lovemaking — Kate Bush in the background: washing machine jumping jacks? Life is going on above the shopfronts in the empty […]
Doll Heads, by Javier Fedrick
Doll Heads To amuse ourselves during quarantine, we set to work on all your old dolls, scalping each straw-haired head and packing it with dirt. We were left with a crowd of carved grins, middle-distance eyes and open minds, which, together, we filled with thyme, and basil, and childish cress— burying the seeds like fists […]
Homecoming, by Bethany Barker
homecoming we’re back here where we started, a pair of salty whelks born by the sea. the beach is vast and quiet. we talk about our escape, about how we dreamed of drifting and washing up like debris, someplace new. we wanted to hide from mismatched lights lining the water’s edge, where dark waves […]
Without Us, by Meena Sears
Without Us The shiny wooden floor is unusually clean for a Tuesday afternoon. No dropped broccoli nor puddles of custard decorate its surface. All the folding tables are lined up along the edges of the room Like soldiers in the trenches waiting for the command. Outside the only whistle to be heard is that […]
Michael Heller Telescope: Selected Poems NYRB Poets £12.99, reviewed by Ian Pople
Michael Heller Telescope: Selected Poems NYRB Poets £12.99 Although Michael Heller’s work tends to be associated with the Objectivism of Reznikoff and Oppen, that is not the first thing that strikes a reader coming to this nearly 300-page Selected. Not only is this an ample selection from Heller’s career, but it shows a wide sweep […]
Paul Valéry, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (tr.)¦The Idea of Perfection The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry: a Bilingual Edition¦(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)¦ reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Paul Valéry, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (translator)¦The Idea of Perfection The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry: a Bilingual Edition¦Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardback $54.50¦ reviewed by Edmund Prestwich Paul Valéry occupies an ambiguous position in modern literary culture. In later life – after he’d stopped writing poetry – he bestrode the French cultural scene like a […]
John Gurney | Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light | reviewed by Ian Pople
John Gurney | Meister Eckhart and the Predicate of Light | Poetry Salzburg: £6.00 John Gurney was one of those writers, present in any culture, who become rather niche figures, rack up a small, focused succés d’estime, and then quietly disappear. So it’s greatly to the credit of Poetry Salzburg who’ve published much else of […]
The Book of Tehran | edited by Fereshteh Ahmadi | reviewed by Kathryn Tann
The Book of Tehran | Comma Press: £9.00 Comma Press’ ‘Reading the City’ title series is rapidly filling up with quality collections, each more intriguing than the last. As they venture abroad to cities so often overlooked as creative hotbeds, these collections are not only an impressive logistical feat, nor merely an exercise in the […]
David Cooke | Staring at a Hoopoe | reviewed by Ken Evans
David Cooke | Staring at a Hoopoe | Dempsey & Windle Publishing: £10 It’s a confident poetry practitioner who opens a collection with a villanelle. The challenging form divides opinion in contemporary poetry, of course, with some saying the last word was had long ago by Thomas and Bishop (with perhaps, an almost grudging acceptance […]
Natalie Scenters-Zapico | Lima::Limόn | reviewed by Ian Pople
Natalie Scenters-Zapico | Lima::Limόn | Copper Canyon Press: $16.00
Dunya Mikhail | In Her Feminine Sign | reviewed by Ian Pople
Dunya Mikhail | In Her Feminine Sign | Carcanet: £10.99 The word ‘luminous’ is used on the back cover blurb to Dunya Mikhail’s new collection, In Her Feminine Sign. And ‘luminous’ seems apposite; there is a clarity and directness to the poems here which does seem luminous. There is also the sense that the poems […]
Manchester International Film Festival (MANIFF) – Days 6, 7 & 8 | reviewed by Peter Wild
Manchester International Film Festival (MANIFF) – Days 6, 7 & 8 In the last of our short series of reviews from this year’s Manchester International Film Festival, we skip merrily from Japan to China, then head on to France and Brazil, before finally ending up in New Orleans. We begin with a late night showing […]
Manchester International Film Festival – Days 3, 4, & 5 | reviewed by Peter Wild
Manchester International Film Festival (MANIFF) – Days 3, 4 & 5 In the second of a short series of reviews from this year’s Manchester International Film Festival, we hopscotch our way through Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Roy’s World, a documentary about the author Barry Gifford, a pair of directorial debuts separated by a couple of decades: […]
Manchester International Film Festival – Day 1 & 2 | reviewed by Peter Wild
Manchester International Film Festival – Day 1 & 2 In the first of a short series of reviews from this year’s Manchester International Film Festival, we cover days 1 and 2 of the festival… The festival opens with an opening night gala premiere for Traumfabrik, a romantic drama set in Berlin in 1961 (and France […]
Tony Hoagland | Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God | reviewed by Ian Pople
Tony Hoagland | Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God | Bloodaxe Books: £9.95 Tony Hoagland once commented that he would position his writing between that of Sharon Olds and Frank O’Hara, between the confessional and the social. For a poet, who’s most lauded book was called What Narcissism Means to Me, that yoking doesn’t […]
David Baker | Swift: New and Selected Poems | reviewed by Ian Pople
David Baker | Swift: New and Selected Poems | Norton $26.95 David Baker’s first Selected Poems, Treatise on Touch, was published by Arc in the UK in 2007. Treatise on Touch introduced the British poetry public to that rarer American poet, the formalist. If there is an obvious lineage into which David Baker fits, it […]
Devin Johnston | Mosses and Lichens | reviewed by Ian Pople
Devin Johnston | Mosses and Lichens | FSG: $23.00 Over six volumes, Devin Johnston has built up a quiet body of poetry which contains astonishing power. If Johnston has concentrated his careful gaze on the natural world, that has never been to the exclusion of the human presence in that world. Nor has his writing […]
The Next Wave and The Suicide’s Son | reviewed by Ian Pople
The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry | edited by Jim Johnstone | Palimpsest Press: £13.99 The Suicide’s Son | James Arthur | Signal Editions: £10.00 In the introduction to their 2010 anthology, Modern Canadian Poets (Carcanet), the editors, Evan Jones and Todd Swift give a fairly exhaustive list of anthologies of […]
Morgan Parker | Magical Negro | reviewed by Ian Pople
Morgan Parker | Magical Negro | Corsair: £10.99 Danez Smith is quoted on the front of Morgan Parker’s new collection as declaring that Parker as ‘on of this generation’s finest minds.’ One reason for concentrating on Parker’s intellect might be that Parker’s writing, for all its often unconstrained, emotional vehemence, is actually a study in […]
Brenda Shaughnessy | The Octopus Museum | reviewed by Ian Pople
Brenda Shaughnessy | The Octopus Museum | Alfred A. Knopf: $25.00 Brenda Shaughnessy’s basic style is to have long prose poem lines composed of short, declarative sentences. The effect of this is both to sustain argument while delivering snap and weight. At the same time, there is sometimes a slightly curt, slightly overly driven feel […]
Julian Daizan Skinner, Laszlo Mihaly, Kazuaki Okazaki | Rough Waking | reviewed by Livi Michael
Julian Daizan Skinner, Laszlo Mihaly, Kazuaki Okazaki | Rough Waking | Zenways Press: £12.99 Rough Waking combines visual imagery and poetry in an exploration of the apparently paradoxical themes of homelessness and confinement; or confinement-in-homelessness and homelessness-in-confinement. The book is divided into three sections, and the contributors are Laszlo Mihaly, a photographer who spent many […]
Dario Jaramillo | Impossible Loves | reviewed by David Cooke
Dario Jaramillo | Impossible Loves | Carcanet: £12.99 Impossible Loves by Dario Jaramillo is a bilingual selection from the work of Colombia’s greatest living poet translated into English by Stephen Gwyn, who has also written a helpful afterword. It’s the first time that Jaramillo’s poems have been made available to an English-speaking audience, an opportunity […]
Ken Evans reviews new work by Emma Simon, Alice Allen, Marie Naughton and Martin Zarrop
The much-missed Les Murray, writing about David Morley, highlighted his capacity to achieve a ‘refraction of the familiar.’ Emma Simon’s Smith/Doorstop pamphlet competition winner The Odds (2019) shares this ability to imbue the everyday with a shining radiance. Mundane details are given a twist of the Gothic as in a pub’s Hades-like cellar (‘The World’s […]
Amanda Berenguer | Materia Prima | reviewed by Ian Pople
Amanda Berenguer | Materia Prima: Selected Poems of Amanda Berenguer | Ugly Duckling Press: $22 Materia Prima is the first extended single publication of Amanda Berenguer’s poetry in English. Berenguer was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1921, and spent much of the rest of her life there; although she did have extended visits to the […]
Emergence | dir. by Joss Arnott | reviewed by Imogen Durant
Emergence | dir. by Joss Arnott | University of Salford Emergence is an intense and varied trio of performances which showcases some outstanding dance. Devised by Joss Arnott in collaboration with dancers from the University of Salford’s MA Dance Performance and Professional Practices Programme, this memorable production raises urgent political and social questions. The first […]
Michael Schmidt | Gilgamesh, the Life of a Poem | reviewed by David Cooke
Michael Schmidt | Gilgamesh, the Life of a Poem | Princeton University Press: £22.00 The long poem known as Gilgamesh or the Epic of Gilgamesh is the most ancient literary text we have and the earliest surviving work of literature that has the power to move and inspire us. It predates the Iliad and the oldest […]
Carolyn Forché | The Country Between Us | reviewed by Ian Pople
Carolyn Forché | The Country Between Us | Bloodaxe: £9.95 Forché’s The Country Between Us is a reissue of a book which was originally published by Jonathan Cape shortly after its original publication in the US. It is a book of poems that documents Forché’s time in El Salvador as it was turning to civil […]
Ben Lerner | The Topeka School | reviewed by Sam Webb
Ben Lerner | The Topeka School | Granta Books: £12.99 A dozen-or-so pages into Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, the narrator Adam Gordon demonstrates the professional debating technique known as ‘the spread’. A competitor proposes as many arguments as possible within their allotted time. The speech is quick and aggressive, ratcheting ‘to nearly unintelligible speed, […]
Olga Zilberbourg | Like Water and Other Stories | reviewed by Alicia J Rouverol
Olga Zilberbourg | Like Water and Other Stories | WTAW Press: $16.95 In an era of ‘short shorts’ hailed in by the venerable Lydia Davis—and culminating in ‘the fragmentary’ in the recent Nobel Prize-winning work of Olga Tokarczuk—one wonders if there remains space for a new collection of shorts: stories that up-end expectation and offer […]
Calexico and Iron & Wine | Bridgewater Hall | Manchester
Calexico and Iron & Wine w/ Lisa O’Neill | Bridgewater Hall | Manchester This Wednesday night Calexico and Iron & Wine performed to a near sold-out crowd at Manchester’s Bridgewater hall in support of their new collaboration, Years to Burn. The joined bands had been nominated that morning for Grammy’s in Best American Roots Performance […]
Richard Clegg makes the case for Neil Campbell
Give Him A Reading: a review of Lanyards by Neil Campbell and a reading at Waterstones, Deansgate by the author, chaired by Nick Royle, on November 7th, 2019 When the team meets up to plan the Manchester Literature Festival, Neil Campbell deserves a place on any events list. He is one of the few […]
David Constantine | The Dressing-Up Box | reviewed by Livi Michael
David Constantine | The Dressing-Up Box | Comma Press: £14.99 In ‘Siding with the Weeds’, the third short story of David Constantine’s new collection The Dressing-Up Room, the protagonist, Joe, goes to visit his old friend Bert. Details of place are meticulously realised; Bert lives on a cul-de-sac on an estate of ‘Sunshine Houses, all […]