MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Birdy
CHRIS SEARLE takes wing with Leeds-born poet of mixed Sri Lankan and English heritage, Seni Seneviratne
White-cheeked Starlings perching on power cables
[Laitche/CC]
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
THE GO-AWAY BIRD: Poems by Seni Seneviratne
Peepal Tree Press, £9.99
MANY poets — and revolutionaries too, from Shelley to Rosenberg to the Palestinian laureate, Mahmoud Darwish — have invoked images of birds as freedom flyers and refugees from the human world on the ground of injustice and stranglehold. But few, like John Clare with his feathery wordplay and simple brilliance, have used their empathy to become the very birds they describe.
The Leeds-born poet of mixed Sri Lankan and English heritage, Seni Seneviratne, does exactly this in her collection The Go-Away Bird.
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