MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Angela Croft - Bleached
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
Bleached
Angela Croft
Sipping lime tea on the balcony
of Hotel Maris, I watch a village
skitter off an open lorry, go barefoot
over gravel, saris unfurl, girls shin up
scaffolding, flutter above Cathedral Road,
oxcarts and rickshaws trundle below,
kick up dust like chili powder,
naked toddlers sprawl on rubble,
catch bubbles from a hosepipe
writhing round the building site.
Relays of boys pass pans of mortar
up to the girls poised on girders
four storeys high, fashioning a tableau
in the sky, where oiled youths toil
in bandanas, their sweat sizzling,
except for the dazzler who thrashes
the air with a black umbrella,
calls the shots over rooftops of Madras,
mops his brow, checks his watch
flops back in his chair.
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SETH SANDRONSKY recommends a production that looks back at the political Tinseltown in the mid-1970s when US cinema ‘didn’t pander to trends’
TONY FOX invites readers to come and hear the story of the remarkable Liverpudlian International Brigader Alexander Foote
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By Alexis Lykiard