Dear All, We are excited to announce that the Manchester Review is back up and running after a long term hiatus, caused by unforeseen circumstances. The review has added two new editors, Joseph Hunter and Paul Knowles, and will be aiming to work through the backlog and produce a new edition in the next […]
Kathryn Tann, Seaglass, reviewed by Joseph Hunter
Kathryn Tann | Seaglass | Calon: £16.99Reviewed by Joseph Hunter Seaglass, the debut essay collection by Kathryn Tan, is best described as part memoir, part nature writing – and there is a great deal of beauty in Tann’s explorations of the crossover between these two things. The collection clearly owes something to the ongoing rise or […]
Uche Okonkwo, A Kind of Madness, reviewed by Usma Malik
Uche Okonkwo, A Kind of Madness, Tin House: $16.95 Reviewed by Usma Malik Uche Okonkwo, an award-winning short story writer, is a former Bernard O’Keefe Scholar and recipient of: a Steinbeck Fellowship, the George Bennett Fellowship (Phillips Exeter Academy), and an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Set in contemporary Nigeria, Okonkwo’s debut short story collection A […]
Editorial
After a long, pandemic-induced hiatus, we are very glad to bring you this new issue of The Manchester Review. If the pandemic brought us to a standstill, the machinery of editing and preparing a new issue has suffered from the new pressures of 2022, as additional tasks and work piled in to the week-by-week maintenance […]
3 Poems
Poetry Society i.m. Sarah Maguire Sarah half a lifetime ago I met you in a meeting at the top of Betterton Street. I remember your tank-commander’s watch exactly an hour wrong. You were one year older and half a lifetime further on. I think we made each other frivolous, though you were serious in your […]
Jemma Borg | Wilder | reviewed by Jack McKenna
Jemma Borg | Wilder | Pavillion Poetry: £9.99 In Wilder, Jemma Borg tackles existential pressures with a series of subtle and flexible eco-poetic experiments that display a range of impressive results. The opening poem is devoted to the sharp, spiny ‘Marsh thistle’. In asking ‘What part of a human soul is this thistle?’, the collection […]
3 Poems
Tree (i) The oak tree planted at my son’s birth stands at fifteen feet in its thirtieth year. This early in the season, it holds its crisp leaves tight as gifts for a lost child, rustles in the wind like tissue paper. I listen for its heart which sleeps on, deep in the cool of […]
Gas
Gas The Friday he has your money by doesn’t come. ‘The reports are the reports,’ he says, not answering the phone. He’s a match and every room he enters has been filling steadily with gas. The anniversary passes like a kidney stone which gives him another good idea. The best he’s had for a while. […]
2 Poems
Commuters My body is like an urban car share. In the morning my ghosts climb aboard. They relish the journey without complaint. They like it best when I have time for breakfast and ask them how they’d like to spend the day. They are happy to come shopping, mow the lawn, search the internet for […]
3 Poems
Vicar prays on the beach Steady upwards on his knees, ruminant by stewing sea. Fear pestering him like a litter of pups. Shhh. These big waves blot out the smallers. Irritated. Next to them he is a dragonfly of a thing flitting the water’s roof, not long in the world: snapped in, snipped out. His […]
3 Poems
Eclipsed The third mask is gone. My favourite. How soft it was; its fleur-de-lys pattern, snug blues on taupe, didn’t make my skin look sallow or grey, but rather fresh, I thought. A cloud on my face, it blotted me safely, as I walked past shuttered shops, stood in queues. It held back smiles and […]
3 Poems
May A maiden aunt, who approached Those dazzling heaps of white As she crossed a field to the well, Along a worn path Her nephew followed in June When the blossom was all over. I fished obsessively in the river And made her anxious. (She believed That the big pool by the bridge Had swallowed […]
2 Poems
Retablo for impossible waters Every river a keening. The Seine: I was flayed on my back, dress shrouding, shoes drifting away, I was inventing my own madness and drowning happily in it. The Rhine: I posed on a rock, singing men to their deaths, that must have been me, the woman left and lost and […]
3 Poems
Slow Cinema Slow Cinema You’re late but it doesn’t matter with this one says the man just go on in and the place is empty so the film’s showing to no one and as it happens it happens to be showing an empty auditorium much like the one you’ve just sat down in with a […]
2 Poems
Trim I had him under the clippers. I asked him apropos if He could have been present At one gig in all of music history What would it have been? He thought about this for a while. Little sheaves of dry dark hair Fell about his shoulders. All The blonde goes out of it At […]
2 Poems
In An Orkney Wood Set off through a kissing gate and walk the old drover’s road through Binscarth and Wasdale past the loch to Refuge Corner. In the silver light of afternoon, alder and ash crowd a hoggin track shrubbed with Purslane. This hillside confounds the myth of a treeless north, as the rook-laden canopy […]
Cocoa l’Orange
Cocoa l’Orange Like a crouching battalion, the thirty houses in Heatherbell Way nestle along the incline of the mountain. The McEntee’s long landing window is positioned directly opposite the window of the Kearney’s master bedroom, slightly to the left of its en-suite bathroom. Since the first lockdown, Jake Kearney has spent more time […]
Fallen Stock
Fallen stock Tony’s out of the door and jogging across the yard before the trailer’s through the gate, a sheepdog worrying his ankles. A moment later his face is at Ed’s window, a tired moon in the dawn light. They’re up on the top fields. Do you need a hand getting out of the […]
My Husband’s Doing Soup
My Husband’s Doing Soup A cyclist shot by, passing so close to Elizabeth that she felt his Lycra-covered arm brush against hers. She stumbled to the side, almost tripping over her own feet. He didn’t even glance her way. He disappeared into the fog, the steady rattle of his wheels on the metal […]
An Unravelling
An Unravelling Julie turned the corner into her street with a touch of grumpiness about her. It was raining steadily, though it hadn’t been when she left her house half an hour before, which was why she had decided against a coat. Now she was wet, the rain having made short shrift of her […]
Paul Henry | As If To Sing | reviewed by Jack McKenna
Paul Henry | As If To Sing | Seren Books: £9.99 Sorrowful songs flow from Paul Henry’s newest collection, As If To Sing. These are careful, melodious poems that learn to listen for the watery current that carries love and loss together in our everyday lives. The opening sonnet, ‘Tributary’, follows the speaker returning to where […]
David Constantine | Rivers of the Unspoilt World | reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles
David Constantine | Rivers of The Unspoilt World | Comma Press: £8.99 Salford author David Constantine, the award winning poet (Queen’s Medal for Poetry 2020), short story writer, translator, and editor, returns with his haunting new collection, ‘Rivers of the Unspoilt World. Constantine’s sixth collection of short stories has a laser sharp focus on the importance […]
Reshma Ruia | Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness | reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles
Reshma Ruia | Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness | Dahlia Publishing: £10.00 Reshma Ruia’s, Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness is a quiet, contemplative short story collection that asks what happens to immigrants’ dreams in the age of globalisation. What is striking about Ruia’s debut short story collection is that all her characters are in a […]
Sally Rooney | Beautiful World, Where Are You | reviewed by Edward Heathman
Sally Rooney | Beautiful World, Where Are You? | Faber & Faber: £16.99 Sally Rooney, Ireland’s most recent literary sensation, certainly knows how to draw readers in with her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? Centring around the friendships between the two main characters and their partners, it offers a familiar portrait of millennials as they […]
Kimiko Hahn | Foreign Bodies | reviewed by Ian Pople
Kimiko Hahn | Foreign Bodies | W.W.Norton: $26.95. There is a strong, driving sense of personal narrative in the poems in Kimiko Hahn’s tenth collection, Foreign Bodies. It feels clear that the ‘I’ in the poems is the writer, herself. This is a first person who is almost fiercely committed to the narratives that create the […]
Nicholas Royle | White Spines, Confessions of a Book Collector | reviewed by Livi Michael
Nicholas Royle, White Spines, Confessions of a Book Collector, Salt Publishing; £9.99 What I anticipated, on hearing about this book, was something similar to Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built, a kind of bildungsroman about the psychology of reading. I was wrong. This unusual volume is more of a literary travelogue for readers, writers, […]
Dorothy Molloy, The Poems of Dorothy Molloy reviewed by David Cooke
The Poems of Dorothy Molloy. Faber & Faber: £10.99. Born in 1942, Dorothy Molloy starting writing poetry relatively late in her life and it is a sad irony that, having been accepted by Faber and Faber, her first collection, Hare Soup, had just been delivered by the printers in the week that she died of […]
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Collected Poems, reviewed by David Cooke
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin: Collected Poems. €20.00 (Pb) The Gallery Press. The publication of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Collected Poems, encompassing some half a century’s work, is a welcome opportunity to appreciate the full extent of her achievement and leaves one in little doubt that her poetry, by virtue of its emotional depth and imaginative élan, […]
Sarah Westcott, Bloom, reviewed by Ken Evans
Sarah Westcott, Bloom, Pavilion Press, University of Liverpool: (£9.99) In her second collection – what the poet refers to as the ‘sister’ to her first, called Slant Light – Westcott sets out her intention from the first line of the opening poem: ‘Have you looked, Have you looked deeply – the feeling, the feeling is […]
Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis: Interviewed by Sarah Walters and reviewed by Alienor Bombarde
Nina Simone’s Gum, by Warren Ellis Interview by Sarah Walters Organised by David Coates, at Manchester’s Blackwells. Following the publication of his memoir Nina Simone’s Chewing Gumthe Australian musician and member of the rock groups Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Warren Ellis, visited Manchester’s Blackwells. There, he discussed his inspiration, and memories with Sarah […]
Editorial
August hauls deep green dreaming into the woods. Even the bracken is so high and thick I am up to my neck. I feel its lure – who doesn’t desire to trust in what’s sprung, the emerald caves, to lean in and be lost. So writes Carola Luther in one of the new poems we […]
2 Poems
The Peacock That lumbering train, tarpaulin wings brushing stone chips and dust, that heaving gush to the terrace, keeping vigil over flower pots and threats from the neighbouring desert—always making a song and dance about everything—a block of iridescence against the co-operative’s cream. The spit and crackle of tempering in daal. Heeng laps the morning […]
2 Poems
Goblincore We knew we weren’t right under our clothes — our tiny wings, our fur. We practiced eye contact on frogspawn at the bottom of the garden. There were hens and eggs lying under bushes in their shamble nests – the bubbled panes of glaire between our fingers, the yolk a golden toad on […]
4 Poems
Greylag Get out my way out the way gaan gaan gaan get out out the way out got to get out gaan gaan get out the way get out gaan got to get out got to get out vandaag today veranderen veranderen verander veranderen veranderen […]
You Are Safe Here
You Are Safe Here We’re in a basement, walls crumbling naked onto a cracked porcelain floor and a single candle wicks into flame, throwing silent blazes on the pockmarked face of our host, Lazaro. His crooked teeth gleam white in the flickering glow and lingering shadows dance on the faces of the two sidekicks […]