MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Gill Learner - Bitter Harvest
Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
Bitter Harvest
Gill Learner
Dark limbs twisted into runes, dowager hair
unloosed to capture shine, the tree stands firm
on roots screwed deep into Vaucluse rock.
Indifferent to myth and symbol, patient
of man and mistral, frost and drought,
it offers gold in tiny packages: gifts
for generations who can read
next Monday’s weather on the wind,
know cailletier from tanche, sow and
harvest according to wax and wane.
Down centuries baladi trees have given
food and light, material for carving, polishing.
Now their roots are clutching Hebron air
as the bulldozers retreat.
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