MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
Latest editorial
Caroline Maldonado - After seeing the British Museum's Sunken Cities exhibition
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
After seeing the British Museum's Sunken Cities exhibition
Caroline Maldonado
The sea between Alexandria and Crete
tips up dinghies, spills out their cargo,
summons one hundred and seventeen lives below
to stock its own museum. Record this date.
A mother holds her baby high to be saved
before she drowns; a man sinks like a column,
like a statue, but not for him a resurrection,
no human limb is fashioned with granite’s weight
nor is soft flesh preserved in metres of silt.
Their corpses like buoyant wood are swept by waves.
Today all along the shoreline they drift.
A fisherman comes upon a sandy grave,
returns to shroud each body with a cloth
as more emerge, not one of them with breath.
Similar stories
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
ANDY CROFT welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
RUTH AYLETT reviews two collections of outright political poetry
by Widad Nabi