GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
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Alex MacDonald - Some Colours For A Friend Who Has Writer's Block
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
Some Colours For A Friend Who Has Writer's Block
Alex MacDonald
Blue Lake is what you see just under the ocean
on postcards, where terrapins open their mouths,
a stitch unsealing, to swallow something surrounded
in grey volcanic sand. Yellow6 is actually mauve,
stripes on borlotti beans running like a footpath,
where it leads, predictably, to the other side of the bean.
Yellow5 is in super moons, in the palms of the only
two dead bodies I have seen and in adverts for hard
banana sweets. Carmine gives the cherry its vampire,
the scattered power tools their juice, the lift
its passenger: a sea of blood. And Red40, those
strawberries, is burned glass, the reflection of light
on light, the balloons trapped in train stations.
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