Welcome to the winter 2013 issue of The Manchester Review. December here in northern England is a muted and chilly sort of thing: long dim mornings, shivering nights and a palette dominated by browns and greys. In that sobering context the work we feature in this issue is a reminder of other places and other seasons\u2014some warmer and more various, others, even tougher, simpler and less humane. \u201cImagine ice,\u201d Jane Routh advises us in her wonderful sequence on the Franklin expedition, \u201cImagine cold.\/Imagine a ship held fast all winter long.\u201d Vona Groarke\u2019s poems, on the other hand, remind us of the beauties and hopefulness of domestic gardens that \u201cforget themselves\/for whole months at a time\/only to turn out their box of tricks\/at the first tilt of new light.\u201d Moniza Alvi\u2019s poems take us back to heat and fearfulness of India at the time of partition, whereas Sean O\u2019Brien with his characteristic vigour urges us to \u201csee sense\u201d in a contemporary \u201cderacinated\u201d northern landscape of \u201cbrickfields and scrub\u201d. Elsewhere in this sparklingly various issue, we visit a crumbling Italian Palazzo in wartime with Elvis Bego, and overhear the dreary complacencies of a middle-class garden party with Richard Lea; we see Helsinki Harbour and Cantabria in Spain in the work of Kerry Hardie, and the \u201cdesperate, debauched carnival\u201d of Las Vegas in Kathryn Kruse\u2019s story \u201cAnd With Such Great Effort to Achieve\u201d. We hope, as always, that you enjoy this latest issue of The Manchester Review and that you find plenty in it to warm, brighten and enrich these short winter days and long winter nights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Welcome to the winter 2013 issue of The Manchester Review. December here in northern England is a muted and chilly sort of thing: long dim mornings, shivering nights and a palette dominated by browns and greys. In that sobering context the work we feature in this issue is a reminder of other places and other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[298],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n