“Listening to jazz is not just recognising Gillespie or Coltrane, it’s recognising the philosophy of collective reinvention…and becoming part of it.” Funnily enough, I hear this quote by New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff on BBC Radio 6 the morning I am anticipating watching GoGo Penguin’s sell-out hometown show: one of two consecutive sold […]
Julia Holter, Gorilla, reviewed by Luke Healey
You’ve probably heard something about Julia Holter by now. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s most recent album Have You In My Wilderness (2015) landed top spot in end-of-year lists compiled by Mojo, Uncut and Piccadilly Records, and singles “Feel You”, “Silhouette” and “Everytime Boots” have been rotated on BBC radio. 2013’s Loud City Song, Holter’s first […]
Zelda Chappel, The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat (Bare Fiction) £8.99, reviewed by Ken Evans
Zelda Chappel, The Girl in the Dog-Tooth Coat – (Bare Fiction, £8.99), reviewed by Ken Evans Zelda Chappell’s poems takes a jagged-edged penny to the ‘Scratch Card’ of love and relationships and never rub through more than two in a row – always there is loss, diminution, a relinquishing. She is adept at grounding yearning […]
Steve Roggenbuck at The Eagle Inn, reviewed by Lucy Burns
As part of my current project of ‘working on anything except my PhD’, I’ve been revisiting a conference paper I gave last year. The paper was on internet poetry and cuteness (and will hopefully resurface at some point) and uses Steve Roggenbuck’s poetry and the anthology, The Yolo Pages (Boosthouse, 2014) to make a claim […]
CRIME: Hong Kong Style season, HOME, preview and interview with Andy Willis by Laura Swift and Joel Swann
CRIME: Hong Kong Style at HOME, February – April 2016 Chinese New Year celebrations in Hong Kong usually begin and end without making international headlines, but this year was different. On the evening of February 8th, the heavy-handed policing of street vendors in Mong Kok gave rise to the violent stand-offs that are now being […]
Lee Machell, On Paper, OBJECT / A, reviewed by Ashley McGovern
Lee Machell: On Paper, December 11 2015 – February 13 2016, OBJECT / A, Friends’ Meeting House There is something essayistic about the title of Lee Machell’s latest show at Manchester’s Object A gallery. On Paper sounds like the laconic lead-in to a short treatise on the notorious fear of the plain blank sheet that […]
William Wantling, In the Enemy Camp: Selected Poems 1964 -1974 (Tangerine Press) £12.00, reviewed by Doug Field
William Wantling, In the Enemy Camp: Selected Poems 1964-1974 (Introduction by John Osborne, Foreword by Thurston Moore). “I can make good word music and rhyme,” declares the narrator of William Wantling’s “Poetry,” “and even sometimes take their breath away—but it always somehow turns out kind of phoney.” A veteran of the Korean War, a criminal and […]
Stephen Payne, Pattern Beyond Chance (Happenstance) £10.00
Stephen Payne Pattern Beyond Chance (Happenstance, £10.00) ‘Stephen Payne’s academic background is in psychology’ says the first line of the blurb on the back of Payne’s Happenstance collection. And this book is quite often about the scientist as poet. It is broken down into four sections: Design; Word; Mind & Time – so asking the […]
Macbeth, HOME, reviewed by Laura Swift
Macbeth, A HOME, Young Vic and Birmingham Repertory Theatre co-production in association with Lucy Guerin Inc., HOME, February 2-6 By the time Macbeth (John Heffernan) learns that his wife has died, he is already slumped against the wall. The rest of the cast stand in the shadows upstage, panting after a frenetic sequence of hypnotic […]
A Girl is a Half Formed Thing, The Lowry, reviewed by Peter Wild
A Girl is a Half Formed Thing, Quay Theatre, The Lowry, February 4 2016 The debut novel by Eimear McBride was a literary cause celebre when it was first published back in 2013, having first been rejected by a number of publishers. McBride has said it took six months to write and nine years to […]
Site redesign
Welcome to the new Manchester Review site! Apart from refreshing the design and generally cleaning things up, we’ve moved a few things around. Along with the current issue, you’ll now see our latest reviews on the home page – and the Reviews link in the main navigation bar will take you to a new comprehensive […]
barbarians: A Trilogy by Hofesh Shechter, HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke
HOME, Thursday 28th January Hofesh Shechter’s barbarians is a postmodern work in the strict sense. Its dance and music are constructed by bricolage and pastiche and these serve as the hyperactive, playful backdrop against which he explores anxieties about the possibilities of making art and particularly about the difficulty of depicting love. This intellectualism is […]
Sarah Corbett, And She Was (Pavilion) £9.99, reviewed by Annie Muir
Sarah Corbett, And She Was (Pavilion, £9.99), reviewed by Annie Muir Whether it’s used as the refrain in the titular Talking Heads song or as the central narrative device of Genesis, the word ‘and’ holds the English language together like braces worn by teenagers to close the gaps in their teeth. In Genesis, as […]
The Revenant (2016), dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
When you went to see a film at The Cornerhouse you could feel secure in the fact that it had already received an important seal of approval. The Cornerhouse didn’t just show any film. It had to be considered a little bit special, and a little bit different, to make it onto the silver screen. […]
The Hateful Eight (2016), dir. Quentin Tarantino, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater
The Hateful Eight, dir. Quentin Tarantino, HOME, January 17 2016 Few films receive the levels of interest and attention that a new Quentin Tarantino release does. Over the last couple of months you’ll have seen the images everywhere. Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell standing in the snow with their guns firmly grasped in their […]
Roseacre, HOME, reviewed by Peter Wild
Roseacre, HOME; January 15-17 I find myself in HOME: Manchester’s newest theatre-cinema-eatery, the bolder and brasher stepchild of that cultural staple, the Cornerhouse. I am sitting on the kind of chairs you find arranged in a school hall before the latest iteration of the Nativity (and it’s a full house, to the extent that we […]
Editorial
Some recent literary works about Manchester share a distinctive aesthetic and a fascination with the city’s disappearing histories and new developments. The playwright Alistair McDowall’s Pomona at the Royal Exchange took the Pomona area’s seemingly empty site and re-imagined it as a dystopian fantasy; earlier this year the young Irish theatre company Anú took Angel […]
Early Wilde / Late Wilde
dear Bird your Feathers stretch becomingly Beneath the Settee. i love your Beak more than you Know; and when i go among the Habitats – of the River when home, the Zoos when away – i Smile to think of your Lines. of course I mean this Ambiguously. i like to think your Gold eye Shadow […]
Two Poems
Monkey Business We don’t. Put it in a vow, put it in the diary, I’ll meet you as arranged. Take your pick from the usual places: the red café near the railway arches, the motorway where the yellow sodium flares. You’re right to wonder if they deserve us. You’re right that sadness capsizes things: the […]
Royalty
Royalty When I was little, my aunt dreamed of daughters. On the weekends, she would take me, my dimples and my temper, show me flowers blooming in her garden: the ground moist, yellow pansies and sweet peas taller than my four feet. I collected garden toads, plucked one from the soil then another, and she […]
Three Poems
Lorna Grove This is as far as street view goes. New green chainlink swelled by greenery. Sky-coloured puddles network into a pond’s skyscape. A warning sign encircles a family of slashed and circled pictograms. Analogy is enclosure. I am looking for where the woods have the furthest to go before hitting road. An interior, off-path, […]
Relativity
Relativity And even if the story never went, the story goes – when Einstein was on the road explaining Relativity to the academy, his chauffeur caught the gist of it so quick and Einstein got so bored, they settled on a quick change act and changed clothes; (not unlike the time my dead brother came […]
Three Poems
Dilemma That girl with that face and from that part of the world. Who commits daily assaults against ‘th’ yet respects every syllable in ‘strawberry’. With that shape and heft and magnitude of backside. Got an arse on ‘er that rolls like the moors. At The Grove she guides the mop across the floor like […]
Night Music
There he was, a priest in the sun; like an actor on his mark. He looked away, effacing, as if to say ‘I have you’, from the start. ‘I have you’, I thought. I had just guided the stylus onto the first track and as the scratchy hum from the speakers confirmed contact I heard […]
Telling Stories
‘I am not attracted to you,’ Sonja said one night when they’d stayed behind to drink their tips. ‘Well, thank God for that,’ Ruth replied knocking her shot glass against Sonja’s. ‘I can’t thank God. I don’t believe in baby stories anymore.’ Sonja had left Sweden as soon as she could. It was not how […]
Three Poems
A Field Trip History looks out on the playing field and some chestnuts in bloom along the Seine, which is out of bounds. These kids are too big for the classroom. They knock over chairs, fumbling for gear— compass tip to caress, electronics to drop. Outside, on the pitch, playing football, they aren’t clumsy, they […]
I’ve been high
I’ve been high When a Chamois broke from mist thick as choked bonfire smoke, one hoof loosening a river of stone. And again, near Llanberris, spradeled like Spiderman on the angled slab, twisting a chock from the crack. A flight above the Kent as an air-cadet, a green blear under the wing. Terrestrial dabbling with […]
Things I Couldn’t Tell Her
I told this story to my best friend Kelly, that crack-of-dawn morning in her flat, when really there were other things I should have been saying – I just couldn’t work out what any of them were. It wasn’t my fault, I was tired, I’d been up all night. At the hospital, sitting with Kelly […]
Three Poems
Hateful Things After Sei Shonagon Juicy news interrupted by a huge, squidgy baby; a man who bangs around between the bed and the door; an indelicate dog woofing through a midnight clinch, not cat-distracted or bone-dreaming; a misled, nude stud who uses the word I more than never and bolts in the morning. (A good […]
Three Poems
Wind Chimes, Too These used to be wine bottles. She is growing, they say, but it is not so much becoming taller as zooming out. At dark she shines a flashlight through the glass, watches the beam grow fat as it runs from her, and says that maybe the sun is just someone holding a […]
Susan Frankie Marla Me
The next morning he’s early into work but I have to get home anyway, because I’m shopping with Susan. Big Asda, not the high street. We like it in here because the wide aisles can contain our conversations, and the ceiling is high enough to cope if she gets the giggles. We put the baskets […]
Lazarus, Hiding in the Chill of a Mountain
A second-grade teacher who thinks herself benevolent writes to Marcus Wing, Inmate #A-04014 every morning for six months before she finally runs down her crime-slimed street to the post office. By then she has accumulated one hundred and eighty-five articles, from decoupage paper cut into the shapes of olive branches and Sacred Hearts to vintage […]
Two Poems
My Stranger hangs where the plaster cracked and the ribs of the house show. He’s the only stranger I can afford, a middle-aged man in a plaid shirt smiling for an artist. Nothing to me, but still I hang him in the hallway and call him dad. Of course visitors have doubts. I know they […]
Three Poems
The Coastguard’s Cottage Tu non ricordi la casa dei doganieri sul rialzo a strapiombo sulla scogliera – Montale We never forgot the coastguard’s cottage out on the tip of Cranfield Point. Still no one lives there; maybe it’s waiting for us to make up our minds and move in? The plans we had the day […]
Three Poems
Rose Here is the rose I cut from the rosebush yesterday, placed upon the ornamental box, a study in life after death. It is morning and you and I have just woken. There is birdsong. Are we becoming light? Our bed is a small Church of England grave, a country place, where the dew settles […]