GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
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Four poems by Pippa Little
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
Directions
You go through the wall:
the Remembering’s on your left,
widows’ dahlias, match-wood crosses –
then John William Robson gone slant, lost
in the pit disaster,
across from him the black yew
with rats in its roots,
a trembling of needles
for they’re gone too fast
to catch their faces:
keep to the path.
Here’s willow for a sailor’s concern,
knuckles tapping at his mossy anchor,
the scrubbed marble doorstep
with its jar of snowdrops for an infant
unnamed and dead two lifetimes over.
I walk here all weathers, in rhododendrons’
Popish purple, blackberries’ wet blue
that get picked at night, in secret.
Winter now, all stab-sticks in black ground,
I’ve nobody here. Years ago
it was all running feet,
unearthly calls, kids in their dens
singing on glue like foxes,
but still I came anyway.
For some it’s a shortcut.
I’ll see you again.
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