MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Becky Cherriman - Austerity
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
Austerity
Becky Cherriman
Hear it scutter
along the guttering of offices,
in the bins behind Waitrose,
the thorned bushes at the playground’s edge –
a language devised by the high-born
to parch the lips of those with less.
Live here too long
and it will shudder down your throat like flu.
You will wake one morning aching with it,
all other tongues you know forgotten –
the vernacular of the workers,
lexicons of children with little,
dialects of kindness,
the diction of being human.
Similar stories
The bard celebrates two other fine practitioners of the art, and laments a lost brewer
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