GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
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Gill Learner - Was it for this
Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter
DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy
STEPHANIE BROWN draws attention to the hidden labour of the female embroiderers, and how a 19th century replica made no such error
MIK SABIERS revels in a band that ploughs an idiosyncratic furrow of expletive laden, guitar-driven alt rock
ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Synthetic Sincerity, Our Hero, Balthazar, Heartstopper Forever, and A Year In London
The bard invites readers to a gig, raps for Clacton, and lays out the Burnham-Hurzeler conundrum
RON JACOBS recommends an important book that enhances the oppositional theories put forth by Fanon and, in doing so, remakes psychology itself
Was it for this
Gill Learner
she’d carried the bulk of him, felt his kick
under her kanga, chewed her lip and thumped the wall
until he squawked in the hut’s dim light?
She’d trekked to the well half an hour each way
with his sweet head nodding against her back
and empty-bellied had heaped his plate so he grew tall.
He’d walked three miles to the mission school
and learned to write and read and count
and vowed to build them a house one day.
They’d sold the camel to pay the man
who promised a bus, a boat, a job
in a glittering city across the sea.
She’d striped every sunset in soot on the wall
for a year and three days in withering hope.
Then the Aid man came to stammer his news
of a boat ablaze near a northern land.
A few had swum but many had drowned
and Kibwe, he feared, was one.
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by Mike Jenkins
The bard invites readers to a gig, raps for Clacton, and lays out the Burnham-Hurzeler conundrum
by Rosie Jackson
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east