Give Him A Reading: a review of Lanyards by Neil Campbell and a reading at Waterstones, Deansgate by the author, chaired by Nick Royle, on November 7th, 2019 When the team meets up to plan the Manchester Literature Festival, Neil Campbell deserves a place on any events list. He is one of the few […]
David Constantine | The Dressing-Up Box | reviewed by Livi Michael
David Constantine | The Dressing-Up Box | Comma Press: £14.99 In ‘Siding with the Weeds’, the third short story of David Constantine’s new collection The Dressing-Up Room, the protagonist, Joe, goes to visit his old friend Bert. Details of place are meticulously realised; Bert lives on a cul-de-sac on an estate of ‘Sunshine Houses, all […]
Louder than Words Festival: Jordan Mooney and Cathi Unsworth, reviewed by Alienor Bombarde
Books, Ballet and Bodacious Backgrounds – Defying Gravity and Defining a Punk Ethic Jordan Mooney and Cathi Unsworth were interviewed by John Robb on Saturday, 9th of November, 2019, at the Louder than Words Festival Jordan Mooney, the punk symbol who disappeared from London in the 1980s, has come back to the public eye among […]
Justin Wymer | Deed | reviewed by Ian Pople
Justin Wymer | Deed | Elixir Press: $17.00 The title of this, Justin Wymer’s first book, certainly reflects the involving, driven quality of the poems between its covers. Wymer is not afraid to push the reader. And he does this not only in the subject matter of the poems but also in the impacted quality […]
Zadie Smith | Grand Union | reviewed by Sam Webb
Zadie Smith | Grand Union | Hamish Hamilton: £20.00 (Hardback) Since the publication of White Teeth in the year 2000, Zadie Smith has published her fair share of books: four novels, a novella, two collections of essays, dozens of journalism pieces and now a short story collection, Grand Union. And like the rest, this book […]
The Talleyrand | How To Beat Up Your Dad | reviewed by Fran Slater
The Talleyrand | How to Beat Up Your Dad | October 16th, 2019 What did you get up to last night? My evening started with a band that resembled the twisted lovechildren of Flight of the Conchords and recent Arctic Monkeys, and ended with a barely clothed man standing over his bleeding father on the […]
Michael O’Neill | Crash and Burn | reviewed by Ian Pople
Michael O’Neill | Crash and Burn | Arc Publications: £10.99 Michael O’Neill’s death in December of last year was a grievous loss to British letters. He was one of our finest commentators on Romantic poetry, in particular Shelley, whose collected works he edited with Zachary Leader, although these were not his only academic interests. O’Neill’s […]
MLF 2019: Emilie Pine and Sinead Gleeson at the IABF, 13/10/19, reviewed by Erin McNamara
Emilie Pine and Sinéad Gleeson were interviewed by Kate Feld at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on 13th October. After introductions, Gleeson read from an essay entitled ‘On the Atomic Nature of Trimesters’ from her collection Constellations, and Pine from the first of her book Notes to Self – ‘Notes on Intemperance’. While very different […]
MLF 2019: Booker Prize Shortlist, with Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Martin Harris Centre, 11/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Way
“The suffering of the novelist”: 2019 Booker Prize Shortlist Bernardine Evaristo, Lucy Ellmann & Chigozie Obioma in conversation with Ellah Wakatama Allfrey 11th October 2019, Martin Harris Centre An evening with three of the Booker Prize nominees – Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other), Lucy Ellmann (Ducks, Newburyport) and Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities) – […]
Two Memoirs: Moby, Then It Fell Apart | Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey, reviewed by Richard Clegg
Moby: Then It Fell Apart, Faber & Faber: £14.99 Patti Smith: Year of the Monkey, Bloomsbury: £12.99 Moby and Patti Smith represent two distinct generations of American music. Moby is one of the leading creators of popular electronic dance music. His breakthrough album Play became the soundtrack for films, and many adverts. His videos have […]
Cork International Short Story Festival 2019 (25 – 28 September), reviewed by Phil Olsen
A Partial Diary of the Cork International Short Story Festival 2019 (25 – 28 September) Phil Olsen Like me, the Cork Arts Theatre was established in 1976 (though I was never fondly referred to as the “CAT Club” in my early years). It is here that I arrived on a rainy late September evening to […]
MLF 2019: Elif Shafak at Central Library, 10/10/19, reviewed by Probert Dean
When Elif Shafak finished her talk, I looked back on the event – an intimate gathering at Manchester Central Library – and reflected on her aesthetic turns of phrase, the lingering visions of her lively prose, and the sobering inevitability with which all discussions now turn to politics. Shafak is described as British-Turkish (or Turkish-British) […]
MLF 2019: ‘A Little Body Are Many Parts / Un Cuerpecito Son Muchas Partes’, 9/10/19, reviewed by Charlotte Wetton
‘A Little Body Are Many Parts / Un Cuerpecito Son Muchas Partes’ is one of those rare and lovely things: a poetry book with the original language and the English translation side by side. Poems from Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’ eight collections, written in Spanish, sit beside Abigail Parry and Seraphina Vick’s English translations. During the […]
MLF 2019: Isabel Galleymore and Stephen Sexton, Blackwell’s, 7/10/19, reviewed by Kathryn Tann
Introduced to Blackwells on a chilly October evening are poets Isabel Galleymore and Stephen Sexton, along with their shining debut collections. Both with previously published pamphlets, both lecturers in Creative Writing, yet both with a unique and distinctive voice; each takes their place before the keen audience to read and discuss their latest work. First […]
MLF 2019: Take 2, Jonathan Safran Foer at the Cosmo Rodewald, 8/10/19, reviewed by Erin McNamara
Jonathan Safran Foer has a plan to tackle climate change – but he wants you to come up with your own. In conversation with Erica Wagner, former literary editor of The Times, the writer discussed his latest book – a non-fiction work on climate change that is not so much a call to arms as […]
MLF 2019: Take 1, Jonathan Safran Foer at the Cosmo Rodewald, 8/10/19, reviewed by Joss Areté Kelvin
Jonathan Safran Foer, Literature Live at the Martin Harris Centre, Centre for New Writing, 8/10/19, reviewed by Joss Areté Kelvin Acclaimed novelist and non-fiction writer Jonathan Safran Foer is sharing his own vulnerabilities in an effort to get his audience to question our own. His new book, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Starts […]
MLF 2019: Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein, RNCM Theatre, 5/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Hase
Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: Manchester Literature Festival at the RNCM Theatre in partnership with the Centre for New Writing, 5/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Hase On the evening of Saturday the 5th of October Jeanette Winterson gave a reading unlike any other. Interactive, dramatic, futuristic, her performance was electrifying. Winterson animated the audience with her insightful and […]
Marilyn Hacker | Blazons: New and Selected Poems | reviewed by Ian Pople
Marilyn Hacker | Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000 – 2018 | Carcanet: £14.99 There is a detailed, but never dry, attention paid in the poems in Marilyn Hacker’s new, Selected; an attention is not only to the things she observes, but, and this is a huge part of Hacker’s success, there is a real […]
MLF 2019: Common People at The Cosmo Rodewald Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, 5/10/19 reviewed by Charlotte Wetton
Review of Common People, Manchester Literature I went to the ‘Common People’ event because I crave new stories and new voices. Working-class experience in literature is a rich seam not yet tapped. If I were a publisher, I would be signing up some of these debut writers pronto. Common People is an anthology of memoir – […]
MLF 2019: David Nicholls in conversation with Alex Clark, at the Cosmo Rodewald Hall, Martin Harris Centre, 4/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Way
David Nicholls in conversation with Alex Clark The last time journalist Alex Clark interviewed writer David Nicholls in Manchester, it was, she says, a “mad experience” involving the police and broken microphones. David returned to Manchester on 4th October 2019 as part of his book tour for Sweet Sorrow – a story of first love […]
Paul Muldoon and Alice Oswald: Literature Live at The Martin Harris Centre, Centre for New Writing, 3/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Hase
Paul Muldoon and Alice Oswald: Literature Live at The Martin Harris Centre, Centre for New Writing, 3/10/19, reviewed by Georgia Hase An evening in time, out of time, about time. Last night the remarkable Alice Oswald and Paul Muldoon gave the Centre of New Writing an evening of laughter and reflection. Both poets chose from […]
Macbeth, Royal Exchange 13 Sept – 19 Oct, reviewed by Ronan Long
Macbeth | The Royal Exchange Macbeth has, at this point, been reshaped and diverted in so many different ways, it seems impossible for a director to find something new and explorable in its enduring characters and story. In directing this modernized incarnation, Christopher Haydon definitely gives it a good shot. The play opens with a […]
HarmonieBand | Berlin: Symphony of a Great City | reviewed by David Adamson
HarmonieBand presents Berlin: Symphony of a Great City | HOME, Manchester 1982 European Cup winners Aston Villa have a song that goes, “Aston Villa FC / We’re by far the greatest team the world has ever seen”. Now, I’m all for the occasional self-congratulation, but history – and that slippery adjective – have a way […]
Editorial
It is a truism that Elizabeth Bishop was in the habit of waiting for decades for her material to discover an apt form, something her friend Robert Lowell celebrated in a poem: Do you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps or empties for the unimaginable phrase– unerring […]
Rebecca Tamás | WITCH | reviewed by Rebecca Hurst
Rebecca Tamás | WITCH | Penned in the Margins £9.99 Rebecca Tamás’ WITCH answered a question I didn’t know I was asking. Before reading WITCH I heard the electric crackle of its imminence: from the social media marketing campaign and Poetry Book Society recommendation, to the sold-out pre-publication performance in Manchester into which I failed […]
A Taste of Honey | The Lowry | reviewed by Peter Wild
A Taste of Honey | The Lowry | Saturday 21st September Subdued is the word. We’re looking at a noirish basement. An underground nightclub, perhaps. A jazz trio – airbrushed drums, double bass, piano – serenade us. A brassy looking blonde starts to belt out a song as people move about the stage, draping her […]
Patricia Smith | Incendiary Art | reviewed by Ian Pople
Patricia Smith | Incendiary Art | Bloodaxe Books: £12 …and indeed it is. There is, perhaps, little surprise about the contents of much of this immensely powerful book. Given the events that are reported, and, as Smith would undoubtedly say, not reported, on our screens each day, Smith has a harrowing if ready stream of […]
Sunset Boulevard reviewed by David Adamson
Sunset Boulevard | HOME | Manchester Now, it is 2019, and Hollywood is a humourless place. Caught between wanting to appear serious about contemporary issues while not taking itself too seriously, it finds itself lurching between a politician’s earnest, pained brow and that fevered, rictus grin that Cherie Blair used to wear in public engagements. […]
Three Poems
Girls Rowing after Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats, 1926 What with all the mackerel, and the trees full of birds the left-behind elderly women still see possibility though it’s no country for old men, or so they say, having listened long to the sages or figured themselves in that way. The last to leave – […]
Beehives
Beehives “Cartwright, Patrick, 2nd January, 1982, aged 28, Hewer. Killed by a fall of stone. When filling coals at a longwall face, a large stone fell between two slips and killed deceased. The place had been carefully examined by the deputy, and was found to be insufficiently timbered.” If an asteroid hit […]
‘For a Child of 1918’: Elizabeth Bishop at Seven Years Old
‘For a Child of 1918’: Elizabeth Bishop at Seven Years Old by Jonathan Ellis 1 ‘Bishop is parenthetical. Her parentheses create emphases even when their purpose is to hesitate not asseverate.’ These are Maureen McLane’s words, not mine, from her astonishingly sharp essay on Elizabeth Bishop and Gertrude Stein in which she reflects on how she came […]
Three Poems
REMEMBERING THE AMBOS MUNDOS They gave us the room next to Hemingway’s: the hotel’s best view — harbour, fortress, green wooded slopes right opposite our rusted balcony. Still we’d drag the shutters closed at noon, struggling to twist the eggshaped handle that kept them locked and stopped the wind banging them on the frames. And […]
My Family and Other Immigrants
My Family and Other Immigrants (Mixing Memory and Desire) The other day I heard someone say that one should treat all recollections with suspicion. *** In 1892, nineteen-year old Adolf Ondruš, travelled from his native Brno in Bohemia to Zagreb. In this town of 80 000 inhabitants, the capital of the autonomous […]
Three Poems
The Plural of Unconscious, or Painting The Forth Bridge Single example in the OED of its use being owned, at least, by a volitional subject, is Norman Mailer, of all people, havering, ‘but that may be my unconsciouses speaking.’ Living ten flights up, the sky’s traffic comes to displace street level stuff, […]