BBC Philharmonic, The Bridgewater Hall; ‘Tragedy and Humour, Darkness and Light’: Sibelius, Tapiola / Kaija Saariaho, Notes on Light / Weill, Violin Concerto / Britten, Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes; November 5 2016. Tapiola, Sibelius’ last great orchestral work before he finally hit the mute button and succumbed to absolute silence at his […]
Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians (Faber & Faber, £13.99), reviewed by Maria Alejandra Barrios
This is the kind of love story that will make you fight for it, the kind that will break your heart and mend it all at once. At every step of the way, it will make you feel that you’re alongside the characters cheering for them or sharing the same doubts as their love progresses. […]
Parquet Courts, Manchester Academy 2, reviewed by Lydia Walker
Parquet Courts, Manchester Academy 2; October 10 2016. Debuting in 2011 with limited edition cassette EP release American Specialties, I’m not sure if Parquet Courts knew they would be storming festivals three years on, and releasing their fifth (ish) studio album two years later still. I say “ish” as their back-catalogue is eclectic: having already […]
Roy Fisher, Slakki: New and Neglected Poems (Bloodaxe) £9.95
Roy Fisher often gives his books gently punning titles. His Collected was entitled ‘The Long and the Short of it’. And Fisher’s New and Neglect’s punning on Selected brings back into circulation a range poems that have been fugitive from the Fisher canon, right from the beginning of Fisher’s publishing; along with a group of lovely […]
The Emperor, HOME, reviewed by Peter Wild
The Emperor, by Ryszard Kapuściński, adapted by Colin Teevan and directed by Walter Meierjohann; September 29, 2016. You don’t need to know much about Haile Selassie to enjoy Kathryn Hunter’s performances in The Emperor, a one-hour, almost one-woman show in which she dons many hats (and shoulder stripes, and walking sticks, and epaulettes, and […]
Giselle, Palace theatre, reviewed by Zoe Gosling
Giselle, English National Ballet, directed and choreographed by Akram Kham, co-produced by Manchester International Festival and Sadler’s Wells; September 27 2016. The English National Ballet’s re-working of the 1841 ballet sees its landscape change from a peasant village to an industrial workhouse, where Giselle (Alina Cojocaru) and her community become the redundant migrant workers of […]
Rambert: A Linha Curva plus other works, The Lowry, reviewed by Elizabeth Mitchell
Rambert: A Linha Curva plus other works, by Itzik Galili; The Lowry, September 28 2016. The Rambert returns to Manchester with a winning combination: a triple bill, a premiere and a raucous audience. The evening opened with the premiere of Flight, choreographed by Malgorzata Dzierzon, herself a dancer with the Rambert between 2006 and […]
A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer, HOME, reviewed by Şima İmşir Parker
A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer, directed by Bryony Kimmings; HOME, September 23 2016. Emma is waiting at the reception of the oncology department. She is sure it is only a matter of time until she leaves. Doctors have spotted a tiny shadow on the lungs of Emma’s son, a little baby called […]
Cathy Galvin, Rough Translation; David Morley, The Death of Wisdom Smith, Prince of Gypsies (Melos Press) £5.00 each
David Morley has had more than his fair share of prizes recently; this year the Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry for his Selected Poems. This beautifully presented pamphlet continues the writing Morley has done using vocabulary from Romani, for which Morley has made a project of bringing Romani back into the mainstream of […]
A Streetcar Named Desire, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Ruari Paton
A Streetcar Named Desire, The Royal Exchange, September 8 2016; directed by Sarah Frankcom. In Tennessee Williams’ 1947 play, a Southern belle, Blanche DuBois (Maxine Peake), is forced to move into the small and squalid New Orleans home of her sister, Stella Kowalski (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), and brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski (Ben Batt) after losing her […]
The Shawshank Redemption, The Lowry, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Shawshank Redemption, The Lowry, May 5 2016; adapted by Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns, directed by David Esbjornson. Hope springs eternal. Any of Stephen King’s constant readers (as the author himself likes to call them) will recognise that three-word phrase. It is the mantra by which Andy Dufresne, protagonist of King’s 1982 novella […]
#micropoem16 competition
For the fourth year running the Centre for New Writing and the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at The University of Manchester ran a #micropoem16 competition. The competition, which was themed around Science, took place between 17 June and 11 July 2016 and asked participants to tweet their micropoem with the hashtag #micropoem16. The […]
Now Listen To Me Very Carefully, HOME, reviewed by William Simms
Bootworks Theatre presents Now Listen To Me Very Carefully, HOME; June 7 2016. Now Listen To Me Very Carefully charts Bootworks Theatre Artistic Director Andy Robert’s self-diagnosed obsession with James Cameron’s 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgement Day. According to Robert’s stage persona, he has seen the film 238 times, and upon entering the theatre he […]
The Poems of Basil Bunting, (Faber) £30.00, reviewed by Ian Pople
The Poems of Basil Bunting edited with and introduction and commentary by Don Share. In 1952, Basil Bunting visited T. S. Eliot with a view to getting Eliot to publish his Poems 1950. This volume had been published in America by one of Pound’s acolytes, Dallam Flynn, although Bunting had little involvement with the book, […]
Love Supreme Jazz Festival 2016, reviewed by Ian Pople
Love Supreme Jazz Festival 2016: Glynde Place, July 1-3. Suggesting that Love Supreme drifts further and further from its ‘jazz fest’ status is a bit like complaining that cats are fickle, or that policemen keep getting younger. But the auguries weren’t good: Brexit, the wettest June on record, the M25 at its customary crawl past a […]
Leabhar na hAthghabhála, Poems of Repossession, ed. by Louis de Paor (Bloodaxe Books) £15.00
Louis de Paor’s bilingual Leabhar na hAthghabhála, Poems of Repossession, is the first major anthology of Irish language poetry for a quarter of a century since Dermot Bolger’s Bright Wave: An Tonn Gheal (Raven Arts Press, 1986) and An Crann Faoi Bhláth, The Flowering Tree (Wolfhound Press, 1991), edited by Declan Kiberd and Gabriel […]
Editorial
The new site-specific show, On Corporation Street, was devised by an Irish theatre company and was commissioned by HOME, whose theatre programme is run by a German artistic director. Anú and Walter Meierjohann have put together a memorable piece of work which responds to the twentieth anniversary of the IRA bombing of Manchester’s city centre. The international aspect of their collaboration feels doubly appropriate today, […]
Amali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers, reviewed by Ian Pople
Amali Rodrigo, Lotus Gatherers,(Bloodaxe Books, £9.95). The blurb to Amali Rodrigo’s first collection, Lotus Gatherers, comments ‘the lotus flower embodies the promise of purity and transcendence because it rises clear out of the muddy mire of its origins. It represents both abstract realms and the concrete phenomenal world. The lotus root is also an aphrodisiac.’ […]
Scarlett O’Hara’s Dress
On Saturday the 18th of April last year, a grey-and-black dress with black zig-zag appliqué, worn by Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in the movie Gone with the Wind, was sold at auction in Beverley Hills for $137,000. Scarlett is first seen in the dress when she meets Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) outside her store, […]
After Vacationing at the Beach
Hand me the map, you say as you reach for the glove compartment. Construction, and we take a detour home. And because I am too slow for your patience, you push my palm back. What you don’t know: I will break our engagement. How you left your dating profile logged on before bed, as if […]
Swansea, 2015
The friggin’ gabba’s going dubbadubbadubbadubbadubba and the whole front room’s jumping, I really should reclaim my decks; this is not the vibe. ‘Right boy, listen, this is it so far. Yew listening?’ ‘Yup,’ he shouts. ‘Right, listen; In this town of crescent moon day breaks too soon casts shadows too sharp for my memory She […]
The Thickness of Dust
It was a strange room, hung with tapestries no one knew the meaning of, symbols, pictograms of all sorts. The colour red figured prominently. Music played quietly in the background, incongruous music, slightly manic, but which no one was listening to anyway. It was there to carry the dips in conversation, of which there happened […]
Colette Went Quiet
Colette called the day I moved into my apartment, just as I had finished wiping down the last of the kitchen cupboards. The phone startled me when it buzzed awake. I had already spoken to my mother and knew it could not be her. ‘Hullo stranger,’ she said, her voice carefully light. ‘Colette,’ I said. […]
It Hasn’t Started Yet
05:16. He wakes abnormally. There’s no light. His name is Martin Purchance. There is light: a green glow from his alarm-clock. It announces a time: 5:16. He doesn’t need to wake yet. Not until 7:00. 06:55. Why has he woken now? One reason: the article deadline, today at 10:00. He thinks about it. The piece […]
Disco Feeling-kin
Nina woke to find him half on top of her, his heavy arm all that was keeping her from falling out of bed. There was a fleck of spittle vibrating on his lip, his face cracked into the pillow like a child’s. She was breathing through her mouth. His pores exuded the fermented sweet and […]
What About India?
At the start of the work day, Marsha felt fine. Perky in fact, coffee pushed aside, eyes on screen, fingers on keyboard. She’d found a bug and posted a problem report, priority 2 in her opinion. A chat box from Randy, the senior development engineer, appeared. – hi marsha priority 3 not a functional problem […]
The Twice Drowned Woman
He watched from an upstairs window as she entered the water. It was one of the few not boarded up, this side beyond reach of even the most competent stone-thrower. The room itself was empty these days, save the rocking chair, where on occasion he’d observe the cycle of the Atlantic as it pitched and […]
Dummy
All the way from his house in the hills down through the river valley, Richard hacked and pointed his directions while beside him I listened and got us where we wanted to be. The streetlights were off but some passing cars had their headlamps on. Just south of town where the river widens and skinny […]
Tuathal (Counter-Clockwise)
Cuirim eochair i bpoll an téitheora agus casaim an chomhla ar tuathal — siar, siar, go dtí go gcloisim sileadh an uisce ag glugarnach as i mbraonta tiubha, an t-aer a bhí srianta scaoilte arís. Le clic and trice-tic, filleann cuisle an phíopa, ag tarraingt teas ar ais trí córas soithíoch an tí, trí fhéitheacha […]
Five Poems
San Pellegrino I sit here facing a glass of water. I have a family: a son, baby daughter. Life’s harder. Harder, and sadder. My father has stage IV lung cancer. He’s dying, only faster. Fall, and he might meet his maker by winter. O let this cup pass, my Father. I sit here facing a […]
She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea*: Meditations on Dunoon’s Victorian Pier
1 I am bound, rooted, salt-stung, tree-limbed, iron bolted. I live with my memories – echoes of footsteps arriving, departing; ghost boats at my thighs. Every timber part of me swims with zooplankton. My only neighbour is my reflection. The sky is sailing around me. Fenders of rock elm protect me. My mouth is a […]
A Mariner
You were a mariner. I lived by the water. You struck new sand for your master and led me to the land where night tulips grow. With your fish-hook you gouged out my throat and surged through me under inky-green skies. You bound me to these tenebrous sands and with ease set your sail for […]
Three Poems
Young Poets In the minx browns of Great Eastern Street, a throbbing cab waits in the pouring rain while a building implores, “Let’s Adore and Endure Each Other.” In the gallery’s late Vorticism, critics’ pens reel in and sour on treasonous reviews. A hood of superior aerodynamic absolutes. We drink at The Gun, spot Tracy […]
Two Poems
Cut to an Echo Indistinct, night wearies itself into day. And dawn comes to with an early bruise lacking yellow. A bird falters to redden its song, a snag of notes that can’t lift. The scalded teapot brews darkly and intensely hot. There is nothing to be done. Not now. The kitchen and its workable […]
Four Poems
Agapanthus I can’t say that the day smiled on us, or that anything smiled, As we dared the wet earth in our wet digging clothes. The late Mrs. Cockburn was in no mood to chat. It was she, After all, who was being evicted by a cruel remote-control: A letter sent from Toronto that saw […]