MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Terry Jones - House in Winter
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
House in Winter
Terry Jones
Building a house in winter, my father
fought with earth cooked to iron by frost.
He'd set a fire to thaw sand, gravel, cement,
free water, then run with the barra’
to lay foundations before concrete set
to a hard ice brick fossilising shovel and pick.
He worked back-breaker hours in cold
so violent it could crack bricks like glass,
on a single touch of steel weld fast a hand.
Though never his. Too quick for that, unequalled
through Yorkshire, he'd load the hod then climb
so fast he met himself returning for a second stack.
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