JAPANESE BOOKSHOP BUZZ In Japan after dark, the big chain second-hand bookshops buzz with activity. Bright and clean and ringing with the tinny sound of J-Pop music, they are literary supermarkets, their shelves crammed with paperback novels, business handbooks, holiday guides to Guam and Hawaii, calligraphy practise books, educational primers, and of course manga in […]
Flora and Pomona
Flora and Pomona The two mediators are late. Karen has lit the fire and run upstairs twice to try and find the email confirming the appointment. Perhaps she was meant to go to their office? She finds the office number and rings, leaving a message, apologising if she’s got the arrangements wrong. She goes to […]
Rosco of the Pineys
Rosco of the Pineys When me and my friends started at the paper mill the other guys who worked there said we’d get used to the stink, but I was the only one never did. I suppose I always saw the job as temporary, so why bother trying to come to terms with it? Other […]
Territories
Territories He was waiting for her, sitting on a bench in the garden of St Paul’s, and he seemed to be watching the cathedral roof where three dirty white doves squabbled noisily. Mary was dressed for the office, in her tweed skirt and winter coat. She hoped her appearance would make him forget, for […]
Escape to Victory
Escape to victory Whose fault was it? Well, it was Michael Caine’s: John Colby’s if you think about it. He had to have Hatch back on the football team, see. And the only way he could do it was to break the goalkeeper’s arm. He knew the Germans would check it, so it had to […]
High Rise
High Rise Jaime lived in the apartment opposite Anna, on the fifteenth floor of the last surviving high rise block in the town. The other neighbours had no time for Jaime, people don’t for drunks, as a rule. Marco lived on the ground floor, you passed his door going in or out of the block. […]
Two Poems
Writing Into the Lines ‘I want my funeral to include this detour.’ Michael Longley, Detour. We come apart. In time. The nerve-knitting that we call an ‘I’ unravels. Which of you is at home when I ask, Where do you want to go today? We’re going nowhere. I hardly know if it is your or […]
Three Poems
An Economic Value sonnet (with no Volta) for Joseph Beuys to tallow-cream slabs of animal fat. to moulded chalks & life-sized stacks of felt. to a reconciliation with brown. to kerosene burns, honey, horse-hair roughs. to blankets soothed by blanket-stitch & the gentle invitation for body. to everything the colour of Crimean steppes without the […]
Three Poems
Thoughts of a Dry Brain in a Dry Season Noon is my darkest hour for it absolves me of my shadow. Now to water the orchids and straighten the postures of dolls in seaside rooms. The protagonist won’t not wake from the coma. No man is an island but he can be stranded on one. […]
Three Poems
The Seventeenth Blow After years of instruction, application, effort, and further study of the masters; after years of slow but steady progress in my so-called art and modest success that comes from isolated acts of recognition paid me by those who took an hour from one day; after years of worry and wonder at the […]
Two Poems
At The Funeral Home Cut to an ebony dais; the five of us blocked as points on a compass in our new accidental ordinance of importance. Beside the undertaker [with folder, pen, pressed shirt, comfortable noose/ matching tie, the very fine cut of gentleman] we rank as follows: Sister1-Mother-Me-Brother-Sister2- until back to the undertaker once […]
Commercial Interests
Commercial Interests The trolley beds are covered right down to their wheels. They’re comfortable. What a great idea having these at work. The other workers watch us through the glass as we talk while holding hands. Is this what I really want? Well maybe. I’ve only known her a few months but she seems really […]
Two Poems
The Ballad of Mamá Pochita After Batsheva Dori-Carlier A decomposing house at the edge of memory, falling into an abyss. Nothing is like it used to be. Her face is a double mask from the afterworld. Del más allá y de aquí. Her broken back, a cracked ruin. She is also at the end of […]
Three Poems
Theme [ gathered not gathered] how you have lived in my house like an assassin as if hardly here as if innocent of a blade I can only be one with a heart once you are gone you say don’t let me down I reply I will never let you down
3 Poems
Prayer to dune and dun potatoes leaving like Margaret’s summerfall beginning this year preparing for the next we’re on our knees with seasons overtaking flowered onion ha ha wall the oso easy rose on our knees humbled by the seas relocating plinth of lawn purple aster paling, emigrating from the inner bay […]
The Last House on the Marsh
The Last House on the Marsh Here there is no divide between land and sea, just a blur of blue where the mud flats rise. Then miles of water-logged green, heavy with the smell of salt and rot, running right up to the sea wall which ziz zags all across this land, holding back the […]
Two Poems
The Man Who Drowned Himself (from “Self-Murderers”) when you looked back your footprints were floating on the waves like dead fishes the road was too long slowly you started to sink into the water like a knife into butter and parallel to you the lead ingots of your footprints descended to the […]
Two Poems
Telemachus We were at Grandma’s house for the last time, my mother, sister and me. While they slept I read, under a blanket, on the edge of the camp bed. The slow glow of the fire imprinting the flickering plain before Troy. I read of Telemachus and his men beaching in the sandy light of […]
Two Poems
Eagle River, 2017 Home one morning to find my hat and gloves hard with frost on the spade handle. Maybe you’d take my silence for a green the sun gives to the shadowgrass. And, as you boil the kettle to melt the drain I’d watch a whole life come and go in the very place […]
Forest | HOME | reviewed by Marsha Courneya
Forest | HOME | January 24th, 2019 Created and performed by James Monaghan, Directed by Leentje Van de Cruys I am an audience member. I don’t have to say anything. This was a mental loop during James Monaghan’s performance of Forest that I repeated to remain present. It can be easy to tune out during […]
Peter Robinson | Ravishing Europa | reviewed by Ian Pople
Peter Robinson | Ravishing Europa | Worple Press: £10.00 Peter Robinson’s new collection from Worple Press is an often elegiac response to the Brexit Referendum. It’s suitably ambiguous title – does Europe ravish, or is it being ravished? – seems almost to respond to the conflict in which the British people, and in particular, its […]
The Hidden Pinup | HOME | reviewed by Marsha Courneya
The Hidden Pinup | HOME | 13th January, 2019 The Hidden Pinup is a seven-minute performance that could be unpacked for hours. The piece moved like a slow zoom from a burlesque fantasy in to the complex history of the black pinup and the ongoing fetishization of women of colour. The theme of beauty giving […]
3 Pamphlets from Rack Press | reviewed by Ian Pople
John Barnie, Sherpas; Kathy Miles, Inside the Animal House; Dawn Morgan, Blood and Other Elements | Rack Press: £5.00 It is the human body which houses the animal for this group of pamphlets from Nicholas Murray’s Rack Press; the animal body in all its states from energised to declining. John Barnie’s Sherpas contains short, pithily […]
Friedrich Holderlin | Selected Poetry | reviewed by Ian Pople
Friedrich Holderlin | Selected Poetry, trans. David Constantine | Bloodaxe: £14.99 Holderlin was born at an extraordinary time, in 1770, the same year as Hegel, Wordsworth and Beethoven. He attended a Lutheran seminary with Hegel and Schelling, and at university he met Fichte and Novalis, and knew Schiller and Goethe. It is suggested that Holderlin […]
Editorial
The Manchester Literature Festival Special Issue As part of our Higher Education partnership with Manchester Literature Festival, the Centre for New Writing has been thrilled to once again partner on a bold and original programme of live lit events, showcasing inspirational writers from across the globe alongside emerging talent from the region. In this Special […]
Letters to James Baldwin
Letters to James Baldwin Dear James, -I wish I could call you – Jimmy, the way that woman you described as handsome and so very clever, Toni Morrison – always called you Jimmy which meant that she loved you, and you her, and that in the never-ending Christmas of your meetings (this is how she […]
Bodies of Colour: A Poetic Script
Bodies of Colour: A Poetic Script 1. DAVE IS ALREADY PLAYING AS THE AUDIENCE ARRIVE. TWO – THREE APPROPRIATE IMPROVISATIONS INSPIRED BY THE COLOURS AND THE STORIES OF THE WALLPAPER IN THE EXHIBITION SPACES. ROMMI IS WITH THE AUDIENCE DOWNSTAIRS, SHE MOVES UPSTAIRS AS THE BULK OF THE AUDIENCE MOVES UPSTAIRS. 2. ROMMI GOES TO […]
Mario Chard | Land of Fire | reviewed by Ian Pople
Mario Chard | Land of Fire | Tupelo Press: $17.95 Mario Chard’s first collection Land of Fire inevitably comes contextualized with biography; Chard was born to an Argentinian ‘immigrant’ mother and an American father. And many of these poems deal directly with the experience of immigration into America; a writing which, in some ways, could […]
Heroines from Abroad (Carcanet), by Christine Marendon, translated by Ken Cockburn, reviewed by Chloé S Vaughan
Heroines from Abroad (Carcanet), by Christine Marendon, translated by Ken Cockburn, reviewed by Chloé S Vaughan ___________________________ Christine Marendon’s Heroines from Abroad, translated by Ken Cockburn, is a revealing collection that reminds us that the power of poetry isn’t limited to the words. The feeling that overcomes you when reading the poems is numinous; they take […]
The 2018 Castlefield Manchester Sermon – I wish for you
The 2018 Castlefield Manchester Sermon – I wish for you There is today, and there has been for some time, a pall of gloom and doom hanging over the environment. And with good reason, very good reason. But it is not the whole story. And being downhearted about it all does not help put it […]
Love makes as many
Love makes as many For all the staff and volunteers at NT Quarry Bank, with my heartfelt thanks -Beth Underdown 1918 The looms are quiet, this week. Government orders. There’s not enough cotton, not enough boats getting through; so, for once, the looms are still. ‘Some folk get on better,’ Martha says, ‘if they close […]
Salford, 1986
Salford, 1986 Introduction Martin Parr’s photographs capture the frozen moment. They offer fleeting glimpses into passing lives, framed and constrained by the parameters of the print. Who are these subjects? We rarely find out; they are dispossessed of literal voices, as all photographic subjects are. Instead it is left to our imaginations to fill in […]
Eight Days Left
Eight Days Left The black ambulance pulled up outside the flat at three minutes to eleven. The pavement was overgrown with dandelion stalks and their feathers caught on Sean’s trousers as he used a chipped brick to wedge open the gate. He pulled keys from his pocket and clicked the lock open revealing a cavernous […]
Posh
Posh ‘I think you’re going to like this place,’ he said ‘it’s posh.’ And I laughed, because actually it was a good, if obvious joke and I liked him for making it and no, I didn’t think he was making fun of me. It was sweet. It was when we were walking through the lobby […]
there & back
there & back i. there Victoria At ten, my globe was this tiled atlas, crimson-black veins the neural pathways of Yorkshire, Lancashire. Here, it’s always evening and I’m holding my dad’s hand, asking what’s Huddersfield? but now we’re moving, travelling backwards till we’re out of sight, now I can’t see the curve of his face. […]