Three Poems

Night Drive That narcotic quality. The paradox of headlights on the hedgerow. Bach’s violins; then the Carpenters, again. We’ve only just begun… Ten and two at ten to two. The slow thunk Of catseyes as you overtake. Going nowhere you know where you’re going. Monotony is the warm fizz in your back. Brake lights for […]

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Today

Today Was a suicided priest book of condolences opened in my way day. Everyone with an angle day. Today was a pus pimpled teenage boy taking his money shot at my tits day, with a handful of coins he owed me day, and said a fuck off or fucked me off day, and the sky […]

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Farriery

He bastes his favourite tree at night with headlights. The leaves lap up the Toyota beams. It will flower soon just for him. His stallion will be garlanded early. Bridled with blossom of chestnut, fragrant with sweet scent. The horse’s mane matches his lover’s in length and russet hue. He stares with pursed lips from […]

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The Extras

We practise our smiles under white diffusers larger than sunbeds. We are the extras, paid in plastic trays of bread and moist sandwich fillings, flagons of instant coffee and saccharined juice. We do as we’re told, laugh towards a glass eye, capturing our imperfect dentistry. We are en masse, this pack of us, hungry to […]

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Two Poems

Look-a-Like It’s been months since I’ve heard from you and I’m beginning to forget which side on the continent you decide to dress each morning. Last time I saw you there was still hair on your head but I suppose you’re old now and nothing lasts forever. I think about if I saw you again, […]

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Two Poems

A New Bicycle Suddenly, in Houston, Texas, which is a three-hour-flight from home, I was buying a new bicycle from a salesman in a pale pink tie. I’d not been up on a bike for twenty-something years, and I had no plans of doing anything to change that but then there I was handing over […]

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The Taxidermist’s Wife

Soft thuds of Colombian butterflies in their glass displays. I dreamed they came to life again. If Louis were here, he’d groan: “Go back to sleep,” and then blow out the candle. But he’s far out at sea. I dreamed shells woke on the window sill, trembling with their inner oceans; a scraping from inside […]

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Four Poems

The Garden After Andrew Marvell It was a time of laurels, a fearless time. I broke away to write – bed in the woods, on the river a moon of ice. Nights unsealed, and the knot of sleep slipped, a beat into waking.              You came and took me like a child              by the hand to […]

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Two Poems

The Birth of the Syllable You said I should write about the fact that I’m coming to the end of a Maya 52-year cycle. I’m not connected by blood or memory to that story-drenched culture but it does populate me at the idea level, like spray at the top of a fizzy drink. Over more […]

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Adam Buxton at Manchester Opera House, reviewed by Ed Chapman

Live at the Opera House – with Adam Buxton, Manchester Opera House; May 25 2016. This event promised one of those hard-to-believe, all-star line-ups that only ever happen in London. And so it proved, with three-quarters of the bill changing. While the reconfigured line-up may not have had quite the star power originally offered, this […]

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The Night Watch, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Fran Slater

The Night Watch, The Royal Exchange; May 19, 2016 (Photograph by Richard Davenport) The Night Watch, in Sarah Waters’ 2006 novel at least, investigates a range of important societal injustices that existed in England around the time of the Second World War. The novel does a thorough job of documenting the issues faced by conscientious […]

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Carlos Acosta: A Classical Farewell, The Lowry, reviewed by Hazel Shaw

Carlos Acosta: A Classical Farewell, The Lowry; May 13, 2016 One of the most striking things about this performance on Carlos Acosta’s farewell tour is how little of it he spent on-stage. Not that I’m complaining, the evening was ably filled by the company of Cuban dancers touring with Acosta, and every one of the […]

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The Book of Khartoum: a city in short fiction, eds. Raph Cormack & Max Shmookler (Comma Press) £9.99, reviewed by Ian Pople

The Khartoum I knew in the early ‘80s, was a dry, sprawling low-rise city, where the dominant mode of transport was still the horse and cart.  The Hilux pick-up bus, known locally as a ‘box’ had started to become more commonplace, bouncing over the vaguely tarmacked, sandy roads that ran even in the city centre.  […]

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Twelfth Night, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater

Twelfth Night, HOME; May 11 2016 There are a few ways to do Shakespeare. Fans of the bard will be familiar with a fair few of them. From the standard stick to the script and stick the actors in clothes that look a bit like those they wore in the 1500s, to the modernise the […]

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An Evening with Chris Packham, The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys

An Evening with Chris Packham: Growing Up Wild, The Lowry; May 9, 2016 I arrived at the Lowry early and was lucky enough to spot Chris Packham in his natural environment – or at least, natural to most of his species – eating lunch at the Tower Coffee Shop. He didn’t notice me. Perhaps if […]

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Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century , HOME, reviewed by Şima İmşir Parker

Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century, Home, 30 April 2016 – 3 July 2016. “The melodramatic body is a body seized with meaning” writes Peter Brooks in “Melodrama, Body, Revolution.” Body is not only a sight branded with meanings and symbolism, but also a sight where resistance becomes possible through the […]

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CRIME: Hong Kong Style season, HOME, reviewed by Laura Swift and Joel Swann

CRIME: Hong Kong Style season, HOME, February 4 – April 7, 2016 HOME’s ambitious season Crime: Hong Kong Style featured some twenty films over the course of two months, including films ranging from forgotten classics like The Swallow Thief, to international blockbusters such as Police Story, to several UK premieres. The season can be judged […]

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Anthony Caleshu, The Victor Poems (Shearsman) £9.95, reviewed by Ian Pople

Anthony Caleshu’s extraordinary book, set in polar regions, appears at first glance to riff on two other poets, T.S. Eliot and W.S. Graham:  T.S. Eliot for those lines from ‘What the Thunder said’ in which the two walking ‘up the white road’ appear to have a ghostly third walking with them.  In Eliot’s notes for […]

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Melos Press pamphlets, reviewed by Ian Pople

A.C.Bevan, The Encyclopaedist; Nicolas Murray, The Migrant Ship; Jo Dixon, A Woman in the Queue, (Melos Press, £5.00). A.C.Bevan’s The Encyclopaedist is subtitled ‘A ready reference in 16 volumes’. The contents page somewhat belies that subtitle as the sixteen poems in the pamphlet are each given an alphabetical designation, beginning with A-AU, and ending with […]

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Kate Tempest in conversation with Dave Haslam, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater

Kate Tempest in conversation with Dave Haslam, HOME, April 17 2016 Something feels a little bit special before the event even gets going. There’s a buzz in the room. You look around as Kate Tempest’s Everybody Down plays through the speakers and you see that the audience is made up of an interesting mixture of […]

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Always (Crashing) season, HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke

Always (Crashing) season, HOME, March 18-31, 2016 The gap in the literary landscape left by J.G. Ballard’s death in 2009 is still very much with us. He was probably the single most important post-war English novelist, and he opened up the scope and style of the English novel far beyond the sentimental, bourgeois realism that […]

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King Lear, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Annie Dickinson

King Lear, The Royal Exchange, dir. Michael Buffong, April 1 – May 7, 2016 With a play like King Lear, William Shakespeare’s formidable tragedy of madness, a divided kingdom, and children turned against their parents, expectations are inevitably going to be high, and director Michael Buffong’s co-production with Talawa Theatre, the Royal Exchange, and Birmingham […]

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Irvine Welsh, The Dancehouse, reviewed by Fran Slater

Irvine Welsh in conversation with Kevin Sampson, April 3 2016 (Photograph of Irvine Welsh & Kevin Sampson, copyright Manchester Literature Festival) Entering The Dancehouse on this wet Sunday evening was a strange experience. We were here for a reading from a new novel and an onstage interview with its author, but the size of the […]

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L’elisir d’amore, Opera North at The Lowry, reviewed by Ashley McGovern

L’elisir d’amore, The Lowry, March 17 2016 The collaboration between harried librettist Felice Romani and the celebrated composer Gaetano Donizetti resulted in a trio of operas about three wildly different women. Overall, they seemed to favour melodrama, beginning with a tragic Tudor mistress in Anna Bolena (1830) and finishing on a lusty high with the […]

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Alessia Cara, Sound Control, reviewed by Marli Roode

Alessia Cara at Sound Control, March 24 2016 After the gig, we went to a bar. I was worried about how I’d write about what’d just happened. My friend Zoe was worried about the state of the world, about the youth of today, about being out of touch and over the hill. She was worried […]

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The Beanfield, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater

The Beanfield, April 2 2016 Have you heard of the Battle of the Beanfield? I don’t mind admitting that, until last night, it wasn’t something that I was aware of. Some of you will be agreeing with me, I’m sure; while others, those who do know about the terrible events that unfolded in a field […]

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The Herbal Bed, The Lowry, reviewed by Ruari Paton

The Herbal Bed, dir. James Dacre The Lowry, 30th March 2016 In the summer of 1613 Susanna Hall (Emma Lowndes), the daughter of William Shakespeare and wife of local doctor John Hall (Jonathan Guy Lewis), is publicly accused by her husband’s former student Jack Lane (Matt Whitchurch) of having an affair with close family friend […]

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Rosie Jackson, The Light Box (Cultured Llama) £10.00

Rosie Jackson The Light Box Cultured Llama £10.00   The Light Box is a very handsome book. The cover features one of Stanley Spencer’s Resurrections and the print is good and clear with very little bleed over the pages.  The poems inside are equally handsome and well written and Spencer features in those. Spencer put […]

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Mariah Carey, Manchester Arena, reviewed by Marli Roode

Mariah Carey, March 18 2016, Manchester Arena (Photograph by David La Chapelle) Mariah is late. There is no support act – who is worthy of supporting Mariah? – and so we wait. So far, everything about the night reminds me of a hen do. Or, more accurately, a parody of a hen do on a […]

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Tony Curtis, Approximately in the Key of C (Arc Publications) £8.09, reviewed by Peter Viggers

Tony Curtis Approximately in the Key of C (Arc Publications) Tony Curtis was born in Dublin, his latest collection Approximately in the Key of C, is a work of seeming ease.  The key of C is thought to be the simplest of keys because it has no sharps and no flats, though Chopin apparently regarded the scale as […]

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The Encounter, HOME, reviewed by Laura Swift

The Encounter, Complicite/Simon McBurney, HOME, March 17th 2016 In 1969, the National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre travels deep into the Amazon rainforest, alone, to find and document the Mayoruna people, a nomadic tribe who, in 1969, have had barely any contact with the rest of the world. In his eagerness to document them, Loren follows […]

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Così fan tutte, Opera North at The Lowry, reviewed by Emma Rhys

Così fan tutte, The Lowry, Salford Quays, 16–18 March 2016 Così fan tutte – the politically incorrect title translated variously as ‘Women Are Like That’, ‘They’re All the Same’, or the preferable, ‘The School for Lovers’ – is an Italian opera composed by Mozart in 1790 to a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. Commissioned by […]

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Karthika Nair, Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (Arc) £12.99, reviewed by Ian Pople

London has just been through one of its public engagements with the Mahabharata.  Thirty years after his acclaimed nine-hour version of the original text, Peter Brook has just brought a short play called ‘Battle’ to the Young Vic;  the reviews were very mixed.  In January, at London’s Round House, the choreographer Akram Khan staged his […]

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Endgame at HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke

Thu 25 Feb 2016 – Sat 12 Mar 2016 There is a moment in Endgame where Clov, the worn out, abused servant of the imperious Hamm, looks through a telescope at the audience and announces that he can see ‘A multitude…in transports…of joy’. The joke isn’t quite that the play is so deathly boring, miserable, […]

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Husbands and Sons, The Royal Exchange, reviewed by Peter Wild

Husbands and Sons, dir. Marianne Elliott, The Royal Exchange, 23 February 2016 Tha knows, doesn’t tha? What to expect from Derek Herbert Lawrence. Tha knows. Cloth caps. Mining towns. Put upon lasses with frownin, frowzy faces. Aye, tha knows. Tha knows what life is like on’t hard edge. Tha knows what it’s like, doesn’t tha? […]

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