The Manchester Review

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 […]

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 […]

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 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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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     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   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     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   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 […]